Parsing Oracle 11g: Enhancing management functionality reusing XML

Oracle's latest database products began to enter beta status at the end of last year, with Oracle releasing hundreds of feature improvements in the initial beta release. As one of the world's largest market share database products suppliers, Oracle's new version of the product can be described with great attention, currently can be determined that the name of this product will be Oracle 11g. In addition to the version update, the new Oracle database will still use G as a suffix to represent this is a database software that contains the basics of the grid technology. According to previous versions of the experience, Oracle released a new version of the database frequency of about 3 years, so Oracle 11g is highly likely to be released before the end of 2007. Will Oracle 11g further expand Oracle's leading edge in the database market? This article will focus on the new features in Oracle 11g to get answers to this question to some extent, and understand the direction of Oracle database product development.

New management features

In Oracle 11g, users can gain multiple aspects of performance improvement. At the Oracle OpenWorld Conference held on October 23, 2006, Oracle's executive vice president Chuck Rozwat had personally addressed Oracle 11g performance. According to Chuck Rozwat, Oracle moved data faster than a dedicated file system, thanks to Oracle's optimization of the database engine, as well as to the large number of compression technologies applied in Oracle 11g. For example, there is a small increase in the compression of data tables and data indexes, and users can perform several general operations such as data column additions and deletions to compressed data. In addition, the Oracle 11g will run faster in the context of triggers, especially for DML triggers, which can be improved by up to One-fourth speed.

A new trigger, called compound, is added to Oracle 11g, which allows simultaneous processing of before, row, and after parts. The benefit of this is to help eliminate errors while managing the working status of each section separately.

ADR (Automatic diagnostic Repository), meaning the Automated Diagnostics library, enables Oracle databases to automatically capture compliant issues with a preset baseline, while also performing certain database health checks. These findings can be documented to assist users in managing the state of the database, and this information can also be sent to Oracle's support department. Another ADR-related mechanism is IPS (Incident Packaging service), often referred to as event packaging services. IPs can collect and package all of the information that needs to be tracked for a particular event, for administrators to manage specific problem domains.

It is worth mentioning that patch updates in Oracle 11g can be broken down by functional features so that users can learn which patches are relevant to the currently used feature, and can also find patches available based on specific functional categories, and the mechanism also supports subscriptions for patches related to specific features. Another notable feature is that Oracle 11g supports hot patches, which eliminates the need to stop the database server in the case of bug fixes and feature patching, which is definitely good news for enterprise users.

XML favourites

There is a high degree of flexibility in Oracle 11g to save XML information in both CLOB and binary ways. Oracle 11g also supports query mechanisms for XML, and there are a number of mechanisms to choose from, such as XQuery. XQuery is a set of specifications for XML data queries and searches introduced by the world's consortium, and the XQuery syntax is relatively simple and intuitive compared to direct manipulation of XML. Speaking of enhancements in XML data processing, it is worth mentioning that Oracle 11g is starting to support JSR 170, a java-based content storage repository API. Oracle 11g provides two-meta XML support, meaning that users can either embed XML in Pl/sql or integrate Pl/sql into XML in the actual use process.

In Oracle 11g, a new type of data is added, known as Simple_integer. This new integer type has non-null properties and is faster at processing speed than Pls_integer. In addition, data table feature support, called Virtual Columns, is also included in the 11g. This mechanism allows users to define data table columns based on actual business functions, thereby building more complex and flexible data tables. Oracle 11g supports a new partitioning scheme that allows users to partition based on time, such as separating new data content from a time interval, which further increases the flexibility of the Oracle database partitioning mechanism.

In addition, Oracle 11g has many improvements in data tables, such as enhanced read-only data tables, binding multiple triggers for a table, and sequencing the triggers.

When XML is available, perhaps no database vendor will pay enough attention to this technology, but today, XML has begun to have a huge impact on data storage. Since XML is widely used as the standard for data exchange and preservation in Internet application field, the development of the next generation database will inevitably leave the footprint of XML. The obvious advantage of XML in data storage is that it is possible to write logical relationships directly into XML files. One of the first ways to integrate XML into the mainstream database engine is to export existing relational data into XML format. There are already databases that can convert the results of SQL queries directly into XML so that applications can use these XML file results directly as content output sources. On this basis, the introduction of existing documents and data into the database through XML is also an important aspect of the problem, and this work is undoubtedly much more complicated. In fact, it is not difficult to import XML-formatted documents into a database because XML files have intrinsic logic and specifications, and the difficulty is to convert disparate documents into XML-formatted files. Of course, the data query work also needs to make the corresponding change, in supporting XML database in the simple rely on SQL query has been difficult to ensure efficiency. There are two different ways to realize the fusion of traditional database and XML, one way is that database vendors can write more converters and tools to realize the interaction between traditional database entity and XML data, and to treat XML data as one of various data manifestations; Another way is to completely include support for XML data at the bottom of the database engine, and even design and build database products based on XML. It's not known how many database vendors have the guts to take the latter strategy, but it also depends on how far XML grows in the area of data storage and performance. But to be sure, supporting XML will give the database vendors enough payback, so in each vendor's new database software capabilities, we will see a lot of XML aspects of the word.