18c

Here’s a problem that (probably) won’t affect the day to day running of most systems – but it could be a pain in the backside for people who write programs to generate repeatable test data. I’m not going to say much about the problem, just leave you with a test script.

Hopefully you’ve followed my very simple and easy guide to downloading the 18c database software for Windows. But of course, software on its own is not much use – we need a database! So let’s get cracking and create one. Using the Start menu like I’ve done below, or using the Windows panels, locate the Database Configuration assistant and start it.

After a few seconds the initial screen will ask what you want to do.  Choose “Create Database”.

If you’re a Windows enterprise, or you want to run your 18c database on your Windows laptop/desktop for research and education, then there has been some good news this week.  The software is now available to you on the OTN network page.  Here’s a walk through of the software installation process

Head to the standard database downloads page

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/index.html

Accept the license agreement and choose the Windows version to download

As you can tell, I have no idea on a name for what I am about to describe. So let me start from the beginning, and set the scene for an idea I have to utilize a cool new 18c feature.

Often in a transactional-style system the busiest table (let us call it SALES for the sake of this discussion) is also

• the biggest table, after all, it has all of our sales in it,
• the most demanded for table, in that, almost every query in our application wants to access it in some way shape or form.

This is in effect the database version of the Pareto Principle. Everyone wants a slice of that SALES “pie”, and the piece of that pie that is in most demand is typically the most recent data. Your application may have pages that will be showing:

Well, finally it’s here! 18c for on-premise installation so the world can all get stuck into the cool new features of the latest release on their own laptops   At least that is what I’ll be doing!

Naturally as soon as I heard the news, I downloaded the software and got ready to set aside the day for installation and creation of an 18c database. But I didn’t need that long – I didn’t need that long at all. Just a few clicks and a few commands and there it was – my 18c database up and running.

Check out how easy it is with my three videos.

Software Installation

By Franck Pachot

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Good news, the latest Patchset for Oracle 12cR2 (which is not named patchset anymore, is actually called release 18c and numbered 18.0.0.0.0) is available for download on OTN. It is great because OTN download does not require access to Support and Software Updates. It is available to anybody under the Free Developer License Terms (basically development, testing, prototyping, and demonstrating for an application that is not in production and for non-commercial use). We all complained about the ‘Cloud First’ strategy because we were are eager to download the latest version. But the positive aspect of it is that we have now on OTN a release that has been stabilized after a few release updates. In the past, only the first version of the latest release was available there. Now we have one with many bug fixed.

By Franck Pachot

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For a previous post I’ve run on 18c a script of mine to get the V$MYSTAT delta values between two queries. This script (new version available on GitHub) generates the queries to store some values and subtract them on the next execution. But I had to fix it for 18c because I relied on some order by in a CTE which is lost in 18c.
The idea was to get the statistic names in a Common Table Expression (CTE):

with stats as (
select rownum n,stat_id,name from (select stat_id,name from v$statname where name in (&names) order by stat_id)
)

and query it from different parts of the UNION ALL which generates the script:

select 'select ' from dual
union all

Some years ago, at the time of 12.1 release, I published in the SOUG newsletter some tests to show the amount of redo generated by different operations on a 10000 rows table. I had run it on 12.2 without seeing the differences and now on 18.1
I get the statistics from mystat using a script that displays them as columns, with the value being the difference from the previous run. I’ve run the same as in the article, and most of the statistics were in the same ballpark.

I wrote a blog post called The Death of UTL_FILE which attracted a comment from a reader:

“There is NO chance to stay at UTL_FILE as it is DESUPPORTED starting with database Version 18c”

This is not the case, but since I wanted to clarify what has changed in 18c, it warrants this small but separate blog post. When UTL_FILE first into existence in Oracle 7, the concept of directory object did not apply to UTL_FILE. Clearly we could not just let UTL_FILE to write to any destination, otherwise a malicious person could write a little PL/SQL block like this:

Partition-wise operations are not something new. I do not remember when they were introduced, but at that time the release number was still a single digit. Anyway, the aim of this post is not to describe the basics, but only to describe what is new in that area in 12c and 18c.

The new features can be grouped in three categories:

• Partition-wise GROUP BY enhancements available as of version 12.2
• Partition-wise DISTINCT enhancements available as of version 12.2
• Partition-wise windowing functions enhancements available as of version 18.1

Before looking at the new features, here are the SQL statements I executed to create a partitioned table that I use through the examples. You can download the script here.