Oracle 11.2.0.4

No RURs for 12.2.0.1 – and Oracle 11.2.0.4 left Extended Support

Last week I blogged about the quarterly patching fun when applying the Release Updates to my environments. But I completely forget to mention and explain a few things. There are No RURs for 12.2.0.1 – and Oracle 11.2.0.4 left Extended Support.

No RURs for 12.2.0.1 - and Oracle 11.2.0.4 left Extended Support

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No Release Update Revisions for Oracle 12.2.0.1

Thanks to my friend Rodrigo Jorge who messaged me on the weekend. He goes way deeper with applying the quarterly patches and highlights the differences. And he recognized and blogged already about the fact that there are no RURs available for Oracle 12.2.0.1.

And …

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To which release should you upgrade to? Revisited …

I’ve had so many discussions with customers and partners, and also with colleagues in the past weeks and months about the support time frames for Oracle Database 12.2. Now I checked the blog, and I found so many posts about support periods. And I wrote a similar blog post already 1.5 years ago. I think it’s time to summarize all that. And give you some guidance as well about to which release should you upgrade to? Revisited …

To which release should you upgrade to? Revisited ...

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Overview

Basically there are 2 sources to learn about Support time frames for the database release:…

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Market Driven Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4

I know that some of you are still on Oracle 11.2.0.4. And I don’t want to argue, why. I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason that you haven’t upgraded yet. Just remember: You can upgrade directly from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to Oracle 19c. Just in case you plan to stay longer than end of 2020 on this ancient release, then you may want to read about the Market Driven Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4.

Market Driven Support for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4

Overview Support Periods Oracle 11g Release 2

First of all, let me give a quick overview on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 – usually …

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Conventional INSERTs into HCC tables may be slower since Oracle 12.2

I work with several customers at the moment on their Oracle 12.2/18c “go live” projects. And one of these customers encountered a strange issue when comparing Oracle 11.2.0.4 to Oracle 12.2.0.1/18.3.0: Conventional INSERTs into HCC tables may be slower since Oracle 12.2. Actually in this particular case, significantly slower. Read below why this can happen and how the workarounds look like.

Hybrid Columnar Compression

There’s a lot of material to read and study about Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC). With HCC we store the same column for a group of rows together. The data block does not store data in row-major …

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How long can you provision database version X in the Cloud? – NEW

A few weeks ago I published a blog post about provisioning dates in Oracle Cloud environments for different databases releases. As we did an important update, I rewrite today: How long can you provision database version X in the Cloud? – NEW.

What has changed since the original post?

The key point in the previous blog post was:

“And by end of this calendar year, the option to provision an Oracle 12.2.0.1 instance will go away. The same will happen in less than 1 year with Oracle 11.2.0.4 instances.”.

With “this calendar year” I pointed to end of 2018. …

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To which release should you upgrade to? Plus: Extended Support?

To which release should you upgrade to? Plus: Extended Support?

A few days ago I blogged about the Current Support Status for Oracle Database Releases. And you’ve sent several questions to me. Some asked about clarification to which release should you upgrade to? Plus: Extended Support questions were quite frequent. So let me clarify this previous blog post a bit.

To which release should you upgrade to?

A few weeks ago we initiated global communication to all customers who had opened an SR within the past 3 years explaining to which release you should upgrade to. Just in case you haven’t seen this communication, I will give you more …

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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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Should we wait for Oracle 19?

Should we wait for Oracle 19?What a wonderful question:
“We are on Oracle 11.2.0.4 right now. Should we wait for Oracle 19 because of the proposed long term support for this release?”

I have gotten this question roughly 15 times in the past week, raised either by colleagues, customers or partners via email, twitter, in web conferences or (old fashioned way) on the phone. People refer to the graph printed in MOS Note: 742060.1. And I won’t replicate it here as this graph can change anytime. And it got adjusted just a few weeks ago as the support timeline for Oracle 12.2.0.1 …

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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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Parallel Index Creation with Data Pump Import

Here is a new capability that might be interesting to anybody who is performing a migration using Data Pump. Previously, Data Pump would create indexes one at a time, specifying the PARALLEL keyword for the CREATE INDEX statement to invoke parallel query for index creation. We used to recommend a workaround to create indexes in parallel, which involved a three-step process of importing without indexes, then creating a SQLFILE of the CREATE INDEX statements, and breaking that file into multiple windows.

Through extensive performance testing we found that it is faster to create multiple indexes in parallel (using a parallel …

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