Oracle 11GR2 version has significant improvements over Oracle 11GR1 version by providing a series of specific capabilities and

product enhancements targeted for consolidation, migration of databases to lower the costs of Database management. In addition, Oracle11GR2 continues to add features and capabilities that extends existing investment in mission-critical infrastructure . Oracle11GR2 has been designed with focus on certain key development areas. These areas are:

Clustering
Performance Availability Security Manageability Business Intelligence and Datawarehousing Automatic Storage Management

Clustering

Agent Development Framework - Oracle Clusterware provides an agent framework for managing all kinds of applications with Oracle Clusterware. Using the agent framework provides optimized application startup, checking, and stopping based on user-defined scripts. This feature helps save money and reduces costs efficiently enabling high availability for applications using Oracle Clusterware. (11gR2)

Out-of-Place Oracle Clusterware Upgrade - A new version of Oracle Clusterware is now installed into a separate home from the current installation. This reduces the downtime required to upgrade a node in the cluster and facilitate the provisioning of clusters within an enterprise. (11gR2)

Cluster Time Service - The Cluster Time Service synchronizes the system time on all nodes in the cluster. A synchronized system time across the cluster is a prerequisite to install and successfully run an Oracle cluster. (11gR2)

Configuration Assistant Support for Removing Oracle RAC Installations. (11gR2) Configuration Assistants Support New Oracle RAC Features. (11gR2)

Downgrading Database Configured With DBControl. (11gR2) Enhanced Cluster Verification Utility. (11gR2) Enterprise Manager Provisioning for Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Real Application Clusters - Enterprise Manager provisioning introduces procedures to easily scale. (11gR2)

Enterprise Manager Support for Grid Plug and Play. (11gR2) Enterprise Manager Support for Oracle Restart. (11gR2) Enterprise Manager-Based Clusterware Resource Management. (11gR2) Grid Plug and Play (GPnP). (11gR2) Improved Clusterware Resource Modeling. (11gR2) Integration of Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) and Oracle Universal Installer (OUI). (11gR2)

Java API for Oracle RAC FAN High Availability Events. (11gR2) Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) Enhancements. (11gR2) Faster relocation of services on node failure. Oracle Clusterware now supports up to 5 copies of the OCR for improved availability of the cluster.

OCR can now be stored in Automatic Storage Management (ASM). Oracle Restart Integration with Oracle Universal Installer. (11gR2) Oracle Universal Installer Support for Removing Oracle RAC Installations. (11gR2) OUI Support for Out-of-Place Oracle Clusterware Upgrade. (11gR2) Patch Application with DBControl. (11gR2) Policy-Based Cluster and Capacity Management. (11gR2) Role-Separated Management - Role-separated management for Oracle Clusterware allows certain administrative tasks to be delegated to different people, representing different roles in the company. It is based on the idea of a clusterware administrator. (11gR2)

Server Control (SRVCTL) Enhancements. (11gR2) Server Control (SRVCTL) Enhancements to Support Grid Plug and Play. (11gR2)

SRVCTL Support for Single-Instance Database in a Cluster. (11gR2) UCP Integration with Oracle Data Guard. (11gR2) UCP Integration with Oracle Real Application Clusters. (11gR2) Universal Connection Pool (UCP) for JDBC. (11gR2) Zero Downtime Patching for Oracle Clusterware and Oracle RAC. (11gR2 Database QoS Management Support. (11gR2) Database Quality of Service (QoS) Management Server (11gR2) Enterprise Manager QoS Management Integration. (11gR2)

Performance improvements

RAC - 70% faster (ADDM has a better global view of the RAC cluster). (11gR1) Streams - 30-50% faster. (11gR1) Optimizer stats collection 10X faster. (11gR1) Query results caching - 25% faster. (11gR1) Table Scans 2.5x Faster using advance compression. (11gR1) OLAP-based Materialized Views for fast OLAP CUBE building. (11gR1) New In-Memory Database Cache, Data cached in application memory, fast and consistent response times and a standard SQL interface.

Result caches - new memory areas in the SGA for storing SQL query results, PL/SQL function results and OCI call results. (11gR1)

Invisible indexes - indexes that are ignored by the optimizer. Handy for testing without dropping. (11gR1)

Oracle secure files 5X faster than normal file systems. (11gR1) No need to have a C-compiler installed to use Native PL/SQL Compilation. (11gR1) Stored Outlines Migration for SQL Plan Management - Stored outlines can be migrated for future and enhanced usage with SQL Plan Management (SPM).

Support for 4 KB Sector Disk Drives - Today, disk drives have 512 byte sectors. Disk drive manufacturers are moving to 4 KB sector drives because it allows them to offer higher capacity with lower overhead.

Client Result Cache Using Table Annotations Support - enables applications to leverage client and server result caching through deployment time knobs as opposed to making application changes. In addition, this feature provides automatic client cache invalidation.

Segment Creation on Demand (11gR2) - The initial segment creation for non partitioned tables and indexes can be delayed until data is first inserted into an object.

System-Managed Indexes for List Partitioning Tables. (11gR2) Zero-Size Unusable Indexes and Index Partitions (11gR2) - Unusable indexes and index partitions do not consume any space in the database anymore; they become segment less.

Availability improvements

Ability to apply many patches on-line without downtime (RAC and single instance databases). (11gR1)

Data recovery advisor - quickly identify the root cause of failures; auto fix or present recovery options to the DBA. (11gR1)

ASM Preferred Mirror Read/ Faster Mirror Resync. (11gR1) XA transactions spanning multiple servers. (11gR1) Improved runtime connection load balancing. (11gR1) Flashback Transaction/ Oracle Total Recall. (11gR1) Automatic Block Repair - Automatic block repair allows corrupt blocks on the primary database or physical standby database to be automatically repaired, as soon as they are detected, by transferring good blocks from the other destination. (11gR2)

Backup to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Using OSB Cloud Computing. (11gR2) DUPLICATE Without Connection to Target Database. (11gR2) Enhanced Tablespace Point-In-Time Recovery (TSPITR). (11gR2) New DUPLICATE Options:
o o NO REDO (11gR2) UNDO TABLESPACE <ts_name> [, <ts_name> ] (11gR2)

New SET NEWNAME Clauses and Format Options (11gR2)

Tablespace Checks in DUPLICATE. (11gR2) New Oracle Streams Features like (11gR2):
o XStream In - Extended Streams Inbound (XStream In) provides a high performance, transaction-based interface to Oracle Streams for information exchange from non-Oracle databases or file systems. o XStream Out - Extended Streams Outbound (XStream Out) provides a high performance, transaction-based interface to Oracle Streams for information exchange to non-Oracle databases or file systems.

Security improvements

Support for case sensitive and multi-byte passwords (disable by setting SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON initialization parameter to FALSE. (11gR1)

Transparent Data Encryption (support for tablespace level encryption). (11gR1) Hardware based master key protection. (11gR1) Encrypt backups. (11gR1) Kerberos authentication - strong passwords. (11gR1) Add Multi-factor DBA controls with Data Vault. (11gR1) Tablespace Master Key Re-Key (11gR2) - Oracle Advanced Security capability allows customers to change the master key used to protect the encryption keys used to encrypt Oracle tablespaces.

Manageability improvements

New MEMORY_TARGET parameter for Automatic memory tuning. (11gR1) Enterprise Manager Support Workbench for ASM. (11gR2) New Gateway Support (11gR2) EMCA Supports New Oracle RAC Configuration for EM. (11gR2) SQL monitoring (11gR2) - Monitoring the progress of long-running SQL statements at the XPlan level.

Automatic Patching of Time Stamp with Time Zone Data. (11gR2) Prevent Data Loss for Time Zone with Local Time Zone Data Type. (11gR2)

Enterprise Manager Integration with ASM Optimal Disk Placement. (11gR2) Enterprise Manager Support for ASM Cluster File System (ACFS). (11gR2)

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Allow Virtual Columns in the Primary Key or Foreign Key for Reference Partitioning. (11gR2)

Analytic Functions 2.0. (11gR2) EXECUTE Privilege for DIRECTORY Objects. (11gR2) In-Memory Parallel Query. (11gR2) Minimal Effort Parallel Execution - Auto Degree of Parallelism (DOP) and Queuing. (11gR2)

Preprocessing Data for ORACLE_LOADER Access Driver in External Tables. (11gR2) Recursive WITH Clause. (11gR2) Significant Performance Improvement of On-Commit Fast Refresh. (11gR2)

ASM 11GR2 Automatic Storage Management

ASM Cluster File System (ACFS) (11gR2) - The ASM Cluster File System (ACFS) extends Automatic Storage Management (ASM) by providing a robust, modern, general purpose file system for files beyond the Oracle database files. ACFS provides support for files such as Oracle binaries, report files, trace files, alert logs, and other application data files.

ASM Dynamic Volume Manager (DVM) (11gR2) - is a kernel-loadable device driver that provides a standard device driver interface to clients (for example, ACFS). File systems or other processes can do I/O to this device driver as they would to any other disk device driver on the system.

ASM FS Snapshot (11gR2) - is a point-in-time copy of a file system and can provide up to 64 snapshot images as read only and can be used to view a file system as of point in time in the past when they were created. These snapshots can be used as a backup and to restore files which have been deleted by mistake.

Enterprise Manager Integration for ASM File Access Control. (11gR2) Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and Voting Disk on ASM. (11gR2) ASM Optimal Disk Placement (ODP). (11gR2) - Oracle has been sitting together with storage vendors and found ways to enable ASM to make use of storage intelligence features. As of Oracle 11gR2 it is possible to specify on which disk regions the ASM Disks will be placed. This enables us to make use of faster disk zones on the outer regions of disks for better I/O performance. ASMCMD Command Extensions (11gR2) - The ASMCMD tool is extended to include management of ASM disks, disk groups, and ASM instance in addition to managing ASM files.

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) File Access Control. (11gR2) Fast mirror resync after temporary connectivity lost. (11gR1)