Oracle 11g

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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Drop public synonym XMLCONCAT prior to upgrade

Thanks to my team mates, Cindy and Hector, who alerted me on this newly detected issue. When your database has been upgraded from release to release, it could happen that a public synonym XMLCONCAT exists. And before you upgrade to Oracle 12.2.01 or Oracle 18c you must drop this public synonym to avoid upgrade errors.

Drop public synonym XMLCONCAT prior to upgrade

The public synonym XMLCONCAT in pre-9.2.0.2 Oracle databases pointed to a PL/SQL function of the same name. In 9.2.0.2, this PL/SQL function was changed to a C function.The public synonym was no longer needed nor pointing to a …

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Björn Bolltoft’s Blog: Oracle Database Managebility

I know, there are so many blogs out there. Some are good and helpful, others are driven by marketing messages only. But I believe this one will become a really good one in the Oracle universe: Björn Bolltoft’s Blog: Oracle Database Manageability.

Björn Bolltoft’s Blog: Oracle Database Managebility

First of all, let me say some words about Björn. I know Björn now for over 10 years. But he works even longer than I for Oracle. Björn joined Oracle Sweden in 1995. I bumped into Björn at our second Tech Challenge training. This is a hard-core training for geeks, …

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Default Changes SPFILE Parameters – Oracle 12.2

This is the 4th posting in my series about init.ora/SPFILE parameters in Oracle Database 12.2.0.1.

Roy and I did a comparison between default parameter settings in Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 vs Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 vs Oracle Database 12.2.0.1. And some changes are quite interesting – of course the memory driven parameters are left out in this list.

Color RED marks a change between releases.
The databases were …

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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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DBUA can ignore underscores with “keepHiddenParams”

Important Update (Aug 17, 2019):
This option does not exist since Oracle 18c anymore due to bug 26762080. Instead you could try to use dbua -initParam (just be aware that you can’t pass on an event with this option).

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The Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) is the graphical tool to upgrade Oracle databases. And the DBUA removes underscore parameters by default from the SPFILE when upgrading a database. If you don’t want this, there’s a way to tell it how DBUA can ignore underscores with “keepHiddenParams”.

DBUA can ignore underscores with “keepHiddenParams”

The DBUA by default will remove all

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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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CSX Corporation Upgrades Databases 2x Faster With Oracle Real Application Testing

Wow – one of our reference projects went into the Yahoo Finance webpages. Carol Tagliaferri (my direct manager) worked with CSX, one of the largest US based railway companies, over a longer period together with the RAT team, and helped CSX to successfully upgrade and migrate their database landscape to Oracle Database 11.2.
Plus: We did present about CSX at Oracle Open World 2012 as this project is a perfect showcase for:

(a) an Upgrade project with many databases
(b) over a longer period of time
(c) using Real Application Testing decreasing the testing effort by factors!

Read the published

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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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AIB – Allied Irish Banks – Upgrade Success

Just a quick note on Allied Irish Banks (AIB), a customer colleagues and I did work with on their upgrade and migration to Oracle Database 11.2  They’ve done a tremendous job and finally were present at OOW 2012 in San Francisco. Mina, my presales colleague from Oracle Ireland, gave me heads up about the short videos they’ve produced in SF with the AIB folks now being available on o.com.

1- Allied Irish Bank Transforms Business With Oracle

2- Allied Irish Bank Consolidates to an Oracle Private Cloud

-Mike…

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New version of the huge Upgrade to 11.2 slides uploaded

It took a while to create a new and corrected version of the huge (sorry … now over 500 slides) Upgrade and Migration to Oracle Database 11.2 slide deck.
But you’ll find it to the right in the Slides Download Center.

As we will start with a new deck for the upcoming Oracle Database 12c slide set the old one may not see changes anymore from now on. And thanks a lot to everybody who has been helped to correct typos, syntax or naming errors and highlighted topics or misbehavior of the database we haven’t seen …

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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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