General

Welcome onboard at Oracle: Rodrigo Jorge

We are thrilled to announce that as of June 7, 2021 we have a new member in our Product Management team: Rodrigo Jorge joins our group as Product Manager for Database Cloud Migrations, Upgrade and Patching. Many of you may know Rodrigo already. He “was” an Oracle ACE Director until June 6, presented at many conferences and user group events – and he has an excellent technical blog. We are really excited to welcome Rodrigo at Oracle.

Who is Rodrigo?

Rodrigo is joining us from Accenture / Enkitec. He’s very well known in
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Welcome onboard: Daniel Overby Hansen as Cloud Migration PM

I’m very happy to announce that as of January 1, 2020 a new decade begins. And Daniel Overby Hansen joins our group as new Cloud Migration Product Manager. I worked with Daniel on the customer side at SimCorp for many years. When we had a job opening in our group, we were very happy when Daniel applied for the opportunity.

Welcome onboard: Daniel Overby Hansen as Cloud Migration PM

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Who is Daniel?

Welcome onboard: Daniel Overby Hansen as Cloud Migration PM

Daniel Overby Hansen – Senior Principal Product Manager – Cloud Migrations – Oracle

Daniel has many years of experience in building enterprise-grade software from the Danish global provider of financial software, …

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Great License News: Spatial and Graph, Machine Learning

Just this week in Brighton at TechFest19 by UKOUG I’ve heard one of the common complaints about our license strategy. Something I can’t comment in my position. But even better that we are announcing some very good news now. Oracle is listening. It is a reaction to customer’s wishes.

Great License News: Spatial and Graph, Machine Learning

Photo by pxoxo on Unsplash

Spatial and Graph

Effective December 5, 2019, Oracle Spatial and Graph (OSG) option will be included with Oracle Database. This will affect Enterprise Edition, SE2 and Database Cloud Service (DBCS) Standard Edition 2 and Enterprise Edition. This means, you can use Spatial and Graph in all …

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Happy New Year 2019 to all of you!

Happy New Year 2019 to all of you! And thanks for reading the blog. And thanks also for the warm feedback you gave me in the past 20 months since I started this blog on a new platform.

Happy New Year 2019 to all of you!

Photo by Trent Szmolnik on Unsplash

I wish you all a very good start into the new year. If you wonder why I post this while the year is already 7 days old, we Germans have a lot of holidays – and this season it was pretty attractive to take two weeks off with just spending 5 vacation days. Hence, my working …

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Oracle Database 18.3.0 on premises available for download on Linux

Finally … it took a bit longer than expected and many people have mailed me in the past days. But Oracle Database 18.3.0 on premises available for download on Linux.

Oracle Database 18.3.0 on premises available for download on Linux

The other ports may follow soon after. I can’t give dates but you can download Oracle Database 18.3.0 on-prem for Linux now from OTN:

Oracle Database 18.3.0 on premises available for download on Linux

Follow this link to access the download location:

The download gets you the zip file but not the rpm. Those may take a couple of weeks for unknown reasons.

And …

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Minimum Supported Version for Database Upgrades

This question comes up very often: What is the minimum supported version for database upgrades? Or a question I received today: “I have an Oracle 10.2.0.4 database, can I upgrade directly to Oracle 11.2.0.4?”

Usually I have to dig into my old slides from the past to give a definite answer. And of course, the Database Upgrade Guide of each version has the same information somewhere as well. Therefore I’d like to summarize the releases supported for direct database upgrades since Oracle 11.2.0.4 below.

Upgrade?

When I speak about database upgrades, I mean you’ll use either the command line

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Download Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 or older versions from the Oracle Software Cloud

I did blog a few weeks back about the download of older versions of the Oracle Database as OTN offers you only the most recent ones.

Looked pretty simply, huh?

Well, here’s quick “how to” to access older Oracle Software downloads from eDelivery aka Oracle Software Cloud.

  1. Login to https://edelivery.oracle.com/, the Oracle Software Cloud
  2. Start typing “Oracle Database Enter” into the Search by field. It will display you the option below – mark it with a click:

    Search - eDelivery - Oracle

    Search Box in the Oracle Software Cloud

  3. Then use
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In case you miss the downloads of Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 on OTN

Somebody asked me the other day why the download options for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 for Linux and Solaris  disappeared from OTN?

The same will happen with the other platforms as soon as Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 is available on-premises for them as well.

You can always download Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 and previous releases from:

If you can’t locate the older release you are looking for please see this blog post I did in addition:

–Mike…

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Minor Upgrade? Going from 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.4?

My Belgium friend Phillipe Fierens raised a great question on Twitter last week and dropped me an email again after having a discussion with his client:

For Phillipe and myself the answer is pretty clear and straight forward:

There is no minor upgrade anymore since every (patch set) release is a full release and since new parameters, parameter values, features and whatever appears even in patch sets.

But the following discussion on Twitter with comments from all sides made me think about why people would honestly declare going for instance from 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.3 as a minor upgrade whereas going …

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Why you seriously can’t wait for the second release!

Premier Support for Oracle Database 11.2 has ended 4 weeks ago at 31-January-2015. 

I think most Oracle DBAs are aware of it. And I have stressed the topic about the need to upgrade to Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 a lot in the past months via the blog, in workshops and in discussions and customer meetings.

But there are still plenty of people out there you would like to wait for Oracle Database 12.2, the so called “secondrelease. From looking backwards I can understand this thinking. Neither Oracle 9.0 nor Oracle 10.1 were the best and most …

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Oracle Database Documentation – From Past to Present

Yesterday one of my colleagues, well known Data Guard Guru Larry “Murphy” Carpenter, sent out an internal email with links to older and recent Oracle Database Documentation. Reason why you should use the below links: Some sites in the www have stored copies of the doc – but some may represent not the most recent state or may not be complete. So stay with the official Oracle docs only:

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Why cows can fly! Believe it or not …

A colleague of mine, Murilo from Oracle Brasil talked about our roles at Oracle (but this applies to any other software company in the market I’d guess).

Do you believe in flying cows?

  • Sales
    In Sales you’ll sell a customer that cows can fly
  • Presales
    The presales consultant will have to do a presentation showing the ROI, TCO and KPIs of flying cows. She or he may have also a screenshot demo in Powerpoint showing flying cows.
  • Consulting
    The consultant is the person to install the flying-cow piece of software at the customer site and embedd it into the customer’s
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Why people don’t patch and upgrade?!?

Please see the JAPANESE version of this blog post here!!

Discussing the topic “Why Upgrade” or “Why not Upgrade” is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as:

  • A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs
  • A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification
  • Patching means risk
  • Patching changes the execution plans
  • Patching requires too much testing
  • Patching is too much work for our DBAs
  • Patching costs a lot of money and doesn’t pay out

And to be very honest sometimes it’s …

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Download Oracle Database 10.2 and 11.1 Software

In the past weeks several customers did either ask me in person or via email where to download Oracle Database 10.2 software, the base release. They need it for testing or to setup a system for an
older application etc. And there are plenty of reasons for downloading “older” Oracle software.

But it has been completely removed from our OTN page and from eDelivery/SoftwareCloud.

There is a reason for doing that but it would be more informative if somebody at Oracle would have put out a message on OTN and eDelivery excusing for the inconvenience and asking you

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Excellent Source of Upgrade Information in Japanese

If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that we have enjoyed our visits to Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto immensely. We work very closely with our colleagues in Japan, and I would like to highlight a website that will be extremely useful to anybody who can read Japanese. The site is oracledatabase.jp/upgrade. Here is a screenshot:

Screenshot of Oracle Japan site for database upgrade information

With plenty of good information from web articles to white papers, this site is a terrific resource for our Japanese partners and customers!…

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