OTN TechBlog

One of my favorites fixtures of Oracle OpenWorld is the Publishers' Seminar (MC'd by Dr. DBA Ken Jacobs), in which Oracle product management tries to convinces book authors/publishers to write Oracle-related books. For this reason, the presenters often provide fairly detailed information that is intended to educate as well as persuade.

At the seminar today, Andy Mendelsohn offered some more details about Oracle Database 11g Beta:

• If the key theme of 10g was "lowering the cost of ownership" (by 50% in fact), that of 11g is "lowering the cost (and risk) of change management" (or providing "change assurance", as Andy calls it),  which by most reckoning is a major cost in IT. Hence Rozwat's focus on scalability, availability, and database operations in his keynote yesterday.
  
  
• Key features include a new Data Guard infrastructure that supports "Flashback Standby" - the ability to create a standby snapshot for the purpose of regression testing and to keep it in sync with your production database; "Replay Workload" for capturing all (or just SQL) DB activity and then moving it to a testing environment (with no midtier tool required); rolling Online Application Upgrades - install app upgrades or patches online with no downtime!; hot patching; "Quick Fault Resolution" via the capture of all diagnostics related to a fault automatically; and a DB Repair Advisor, a wizard/expert system that guides DBAs through the fault diagnosis and resolution process.
  
  
• Other features include more robust partitioning options to help manage VLDBs (such as partitioning by logical object and automated partition creation); a brand-new high-performance LOB infrastructure; native Java & PL/SQL compilers; and a re-engineered driver for PHP.

These really don't do the exhibit hall(s) justice, but you get the idea: