It's the little things that count

I was thinking the other day about the new major features in Oracle DB 11g whilst preparing for a presentation when a thought occurred to me. What about all the other features in 11g? All the new features that were not "banner headlines" but that make life for people working with the Oracle database a whole lot easier. I then came across a list on the net with almost every single new feature in 11g over the previous release. These thoughts were then cemented when i attended the oracle user group meeting run by Alex Gorbachev (Pythian Group).

The main reason why these thoughts were cemented at the meetup with the oracle user group was because of one of the main discussions with Carl Young from Metcash. He spoke about how much easier life is now that he has migrated to Oracle 11g and about how it's the simple little things that have been changed, upgraded and produced in Oracle 11g that are allowing this to happen. Reduced bath report execution times, no more excel, improved performance through query caching (meaning he didn't have to rebuild the material based view aggregate), and the ability to store more data online are but a few of the main benefits Metcash has received by moving to 11g. The details of his migration can be found here and thanks to ZDnet for such a compelling read. Metcash in Oracle 11g upgrade


Alex also released a lot of the "tricks of the trade" in his presentation. Some of the interesting things that were spoken about involved Automatic Storage Management and RMAN's ability to check and verify the database.

The sydney user group presentation can be seen here:

Oracle 11g New Features Out-of-the-Box by Alex Gorbachev (from Sydney Oracle Meetup #5)

View more PDF documents from Alex Gorbachev.

with some comments about the meetup by Alex.

The group meets bi-weekly in the city (usually) over beer and pizza for a discussion about how Oracle is working in their environment whilst sharing experiences about moving to the latest technology. If you wish to sign up to future meetups the link can be found here: http://www.sydneyoracle.com.au/

All in all it was a good user group meeting. There were many topics discussed and it was awesome to hear about Carl Young and Metcash's transition to Oracle 11g.

The beer and pizza cliche for user groups was well lived up to as well. I'm looking forward ot the next one, which reminds me, we've just created a group on linkedin called "oracle red room". Sign up now, the link is here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1983966

Dave

david.centellas@oracle.com