Oracle Database 11g

Where is the Jan 2017 PSU for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4?

Where is it?

This question reached me a week ago:
Where is the January 2017 PSU for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4?

What’s the deal?” was my first thought – just go and download it from MOS.
Well, not really …

Where to download Proactive Bundle Patches, Patch Set Updates and Patch Sets?

My favorite note is:
MOS Note:1454618.1
Quick Reference to Patch Numbers for PSU, SPU(CPU), BPs and
Patchsets

It gives me access to all the download links for the patch bundles I’m looking for.

But for 11.2.0.4. there’s only “NA” (not available) stated:

And a very …

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Extended Support Fee for Oracle 11.2.0.4 waived until May 31, 2017 – Extended Support until Dec 2020

PLEASE READ THE RECENT UPDATE from Jan 27, 2017 INSTEAD:


Friday, Oct 16, 2015, Oracle announced that the Extended Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 will be waived until May 31, 2017. After this period of Waived Extendend Support, Extended Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 will be offered until end of December 2020.

This information can be found here:

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Ouch, this hurts: bug 17325413 – patch BEFORE upgrade!

PatchI really don’t want to turn this blog into something making our database look bad. But in this case it is really necessary as it is VERY UNUSUAL that we recommend to patch the database BEFORE upgrade.


Just for clarification:

The following topic will affect all databases between 11.1.0.6 and 11.2.0.4.1 – those (and only those) need to be patched BEFORE upgrade. The topic is fixed in 12.1.0.2 but as it gets introduced with the BEFORE upgrade database version you’ll have to apply the fix before upgrade. The inclusion of the fix in 12.1.0.2 means only that the

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Bug Fixing Support for Oracle 11.2.0.3 will end soon

The bug fixing support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.3 will end soon.

From my visits in the past months seeing some really large customer environments with easily over 1000 production databases each I can tell you that there may be many Oracle 11.2.0.3 installations out there. So maybe not everybody is aware of this fact.

It’s hard to believe but the Error Correction Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.3 will end shortly on August 27,2015.

See MOS Note:742060.1 for further details.

And does it need to be said?
Yes, you can – of course – upgrade directly to Oracle Database

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Premier Support for Oracle 11.2 has ended months ago

PLEASE FIND AN UPDATED BLOG POST HERE:


I have blogged many times about the End of Premier Support for Oracle Database 11.2 and the different stages and regulations for Extended Support for this release. But still I’m getting inquiries almost every day, internally and externally.

Let me first point out that I’m not a rep of Oracle Support. I’m just a Product Manager with some Oracle Support background. So you’ll always have to consult our officially available documents and sources as regulations may change …

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Package Differences between Oracle 11.2.0.4 and 12.1.0.2?

The question sounds pretty trivial:

Which packages did exist in Oracle 11.2.0.4 but don’t exist in Oracle 12.1.0.2 anymore?

And going a bit deeper into the topic,

Which procedures and functions calls of SYS packages have been changed since then?

A colleague of mine (thanks to Thomas Kempkens from ACS Support for writing up a fancy procedure – all credits go to him) had to dig this out for a customer,

See the result.
These packages don’t exist in Oracle 12.1.0.2 anymore but did exist in Oracle 11.2.0.4 (without PSUs):

CWM2_OLAP_INSTALLER
DBMS_AMD
DBMS_APPCTX
DBMS_DBLINK
DBMS_DM_IMP_INTERNAL
DBMS_DM_UTIL_INTERNAL
DBMS_DUMA_INTERNAL
DBMS_JDM_INTERNAL
DBMS_RULE_COMPATIBLE_90
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Sleeping Beauties – Upgrade to 11.2.0.4 can be slow

A customer from the US did contact me past week via LinkedIn and raised a question:

“Is it expected that my patch set upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.3 to Oracle 11.2.0.4 takes over 3 hours?”

Of course, no – this is not expected.

This is the upgrade stats gathered post upgrade with utlu112s.sql:

SQL> @?/rdbms/admin/utlu112s.sql ; .
Oracle Database 11.2 Post-Upgrade Status Tool
10-31-2014 10:05:29
Component Current Version Elapsed Time
Name Status Number HH:MM:SS
Oracle Server
. VALID 11.2.0.4.0 02:46:19

JServer JAVA Virtual Machine
. VALID 11.2.0.4.0 00:08:34
[..]
Final Actions
. 00:00:00
Total Upgrade Time: 03:06:47

No, this …

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Avoid Poor Performance and Wrong Results in 11.2.0.4

One of the best notes in MOS got refreshed last night for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4. It has not only information about performance bugs but also about the worst and meanest category of issues, wrong query result bugs. Those are the ones I call the “sleeping beauties” as you as a DBA usually won’t recognize them. It is recognized at the application level when the result of a report is incorrect or instead of 4 rows just 3 rows get delivered in the output. Therefore you should be highly aware of those and add this note to your

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New 11.2.0.4 Parameter: ENABLE_GOLDENGATE_REPLICATION

Just learned something new I couldn’t find actually in the doc at the first glance:

There’s a new init.ora parameter introduced in Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 named:
ENABLE_GOLDENGATE_REPLICATION

By default it is set to FALSE and the parameter got introduced because not only the external use of Oracle GoldenGate requires a valid license but also the use of the internal APIs. For example, XStream provides high performance APIs that enable client
applications to receive and send real-time data changes from an Oracle
database. Other APIs were added for encryption support, trigger
suppression, etc. None of these APIs are licensed with

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Wrong statistics in AUX_STATS$ might puzzle the optimizer

We do recommend the creation of System Statistics under certain circumstances for quite a long time. Since Oracle 9i the optimizer works with a CPU and IO cost based model. And in order to give the optimizer some knowledge about the IO subsystem’s performance and throughput – once System Statistics are collected – they’ll get stored in AUX_STATS$. For this purpose in the old Oracle 9i days some default values had been defined – and you’ll still find those defaults in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 in AUX_STATS$. But these old values don’t reflect the performance …

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It’s always the Optimizer, isn’t it?! – Part 1

Wouldn’t you agree?

My colleagues from the Optimizer Development might forgive me but a lot of people would say: “Everything went fine after upgrade – except for those tiny 3 queries!”. And I know, you have tested a lot. I’d like to tell you about a few issues we’ve seen post upgrade with 11.2.0.2.

  1. You have captured your plans in Oracle 10.2 pre-upgrade.
  2. You have moved these plans from your SQL Tuning Set into the SQL Plan Baseline in Oracle 11.2.
  3. But the optimizer doesn’t pick them although you have:
    (a) ACCEPTED and
    (b) FIXED them.

Why?

It …

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Oracle Database Express Edition 11g Release 2 is now available!

Many customers have asked over the past year whether we would be producing a newer version of the Oracle Database Express Edition, because it makes such a terrific starter database for students, developers, and DBAs. Well, the answer is Yes!

As of today, Oracle Database Express Edition 11g Release 2 is available for download. As with the 10g release, this Express Edition is free of charge. To find more information about downloading the software and documentation, please visit the OTN page for Express Edition.

Remember, you can always upgrade your database to Standard or Enterprise Edition if you outgrow …

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Upgrade – and an interesting surprise

Patchset 11.2.0.2 is out there for a long, looong time. But still Roy and me – and unfortunately our customers – sometimes experience some nice surprises after upgrade.

Roy did work on the weekend with a financial institution customer in the US to support them during their go-live on Oracle 11.2.0.2 with several systems. It was well tested and long planned. And overall the whole process went well except for one database (see Roy’s entry below on the change with JOB_QUEUE_PROCESSES in 11.2.0.2).

Yesterday I’ve received a text message from Roy to have a closer look into a service request …

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Too many heap subpools might break the upgrade

Recently one of our new upcoming Oracle Database 11.2 reference customers did upgrade their production database – a huge EBS system from Oracle 9.2.0.8 to Oracle Database 11.2.0.2. They’ve tested very well, we’ve optimized the upgrade process, the recompilation timings etc.

But once the live upgrade was done it did fail in the JAVA component piece with this error:

begin if
initjvmaux.startstep(‘CREATE_JAVA_SYSTEM’) then
*
ORA-29553:
classw in use: SYS.javax/mail/folder
ORA-06512: at “SYS.INITJVMAUX”, line 23
ORA-06512: at line 5

Support diagnosis was pretty quick – and refered to:
Bug 10165223 – ORA-29553: class in
use: sys.javax/mail/folder during database

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Will gathering fixed object stats reduce recompilation time post upgrade?

Interesting question, isn’t it?
Will the time to recompile invalid objects post upgrade decreased once fixed object stats have been gathered?

First of all fixed object stats on X$-tables won’t be gathered by default [This will change with Oracle 12c where it is part of the Auto Stats Gathering job].
X$ structures are undocumented. V$ views are build on top of them and
should only be used even though it might be sometimes useful to access
X$ tables such as X$BH (buffer headers – contains information describing the current contents of a piece of the buffer cache

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11.2.0.2 Bundled Patch 3 for Linux x86-64bit released


NOTE ADDED ON 25-MAY-2011


Please be aware that this entry has been published a long while ago. As of today (end of May 2011) Exadata BP10 (and not BP3) is the most recent Bundle Patch. And me and some colleagues have learned in the past months that applying Exadata BPs to a non-Exadata environment might cause some trouble once you request an one-off/interim patch on top of an Exadata BP.


Officially this Bundle Patch for Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 is titled “Exadata Database recommended patch” and got released yesterday. But I would recommend this one to all customers using 11.2.0.2 Grid …

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Patch Set 11.2.0.2 for Win32 and Win64 now available

2010_12_16_win.jpg

Oracle Database Patch Set 11.2.0.2 for Windows (Patch: 10098816) is now available for download from support.oracle.com:

Please keep in mind:

  • It’s a full install – you don’t have to download 11.2.0.1 first, you can start right with 11.2.0.2
  • Installation will be done by default into a separate %ORACLE_HOME% .- and this is our strong recommendation.
  • If you’d like to install into your existing
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Recap on Deinstall Routines

A few weeks ago I’Ve posted something about the deinstall utility as OUI doesn’t offer a “deinstall software” option anymore:
How to deinstall “old” SW after 11.2.0.2 has been applied?

And I’ve got some feedback (which is a good sign as it means that some of the content might be useful and will be read – and from the follow-up you see that we’ll read your comments and emails as well 🙂 ).

Anyway, the feedback was either CRS deinstall does not work the right way or deinstall cleans up too many things. So Roy did follow …

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Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for Windows available!

Hi there,

just returned from vacation – and the Easter bunny (was its name Tux??) just delivered the Windows release (32bit and 64bit) of Oracle Database 11g Release 2. It’s available for download from edelivery.oracle.com or OTN:

2010_04_06_Tux-Windows-7-Teaser.png

 

And if you wonder yourself why it took sooooooo long to release Oracle Database 11g Release 2 on the Windows platform: The developers have incorporated a lot of the available fixes on top of 11.2.0.1.0 – so it’s more a 11.2.0.1.1/2 😉

And don’t forget …

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Dmitry’s upgrade findings

Last week in Russia Dmitry Volkov and me were discussing a lot of upgrade actions and projects going on. And thanks again, Dmitry, for organizing everything so well.

Dmitry pointed me to one thing regarding your client applications when you’ll upgrade.
According to Note 883702.1, an $ORACLE_HOME/lib32 does not exist in an 64bit Oracle Database 11g Release 2. This means you’ll have to install a seperate 32bit client in addition.2010_02_10_Dmitry.JPG

Let me also take the chance to point to Dmitry’s Blog where you find also some information on the Russian workshops: http://dsvolk.blogspot.com/

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Optimizer patch recommendation for Oracle 11.1.0.7

Thanks to Thomas Kempkens from Oracle’s ACS Support who brought this to my attention:

This will just apply to 11.1.0.6 and 11.1.0.7 customers:
It is possible to get an ORA-979 for a query containing a subquery with an aggregate and no group by.
This issue is known as bug7189491 (non-public) – there are one-offs (single patches) available on top of 11.1.0.7 for Linux (32/64bit) and Solaris.
If you’ll still get an ORA-979 then you might set _optimizer_group_by_placement to false

You’ll find further information in Note:8260094…

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Oracle Database 11gR2 launched in the Netherlands

2009_09_24_11gR2Banner.jpg

Yesterday, on the 23rd of September, Oracle Database 11gR2 got launched in the Netherlands in the Hart van Holland in Nijkerk. Over 150 customers attanded the keynotes and several technical sessions about 11gR2.

Mark Townsend, VP Product Management, opened the launch with an excellent keynote on 11gR2 features and cost savings.

2009_09_23_LaunchHolland.jpg

Chris Baker, SVP Core Tech Business EMEA, gave a lecture on the new Oracle SUN Exadata V2 Database machine. And afterwards customers spread up in 3 tracks to visit technical presentations on In-Memory-Cache-Database, Consolidation, cost-effective security, MAA and. of course, …

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