Laurent Schneider

10.2.0.3 patch is released for various plateforms, like Linux (x86,x86_64,Itanium), Windows (32bits/64bits), Solaris (64 bits) and Z/OS
Patch 5337014

While browsing on the support/desupport notice, I find out that exp is going to be desupported in 10gR2.

Metalink Note 345187.1

The original import will still be supported for upgrade from older releases. For upgrade to newer releases (11g,12g), use expdp.

How long is Oracle 9iR2/10g going to be supported? Infinitely!

Metalink updated the upcoming desupport advisory.

For 8iR3, you had something like :

Error Correction Support (ECS):     31-DEC-2004
Extended Support (ES):              31-DEC-2007
Extended Maintenance Support (EMS): 31-DEC-2006

Now for 9iR2, 10gR1, 10gR2, you have this :

Release  GA Date   Premier   Extended  Sustaining
                   Support   Support   Support
-------  --------  --------  --------  ----------
DB 9.2   Jul 2002  Jul 2007  Jul 2010  Indefinite
DB 10.1  Jan 2004  Jan 2009  Jan 2012  Indefinite
DB 10.2  Jul 2005  Jul 2010  Jul 2013  Indefinite

Sustaining support is less than extended support, you do not get upgrade script and compatibility with new products (ex: connection from 9i client to Oracle 14x is not supported). But it let you keep your very old stuff supported by Oracle.

Read more :
Oracle Lifetime Support Policy Datasheet PDF 110K
Oracle Technical Support Policies PDF 258K

Check the oracle magazine on otn.oracle.com/oramag

In the peer-to-peer, you can read more about 3 Oracle Aces, Steve Karam, Nicolas Gasparotto, Dave Moore.

In the technology columns, three more aces talk about Oracle technlogies. Steven Feuerstein about The Right Place for PL/SQL, Arup Nanda about Recover in a Flash, and Tom Kyte about On Top-n and Pagination Queries. Tom also remind us that group by does not sort. However, if you have one application which used to expect sorted result in 9i and is now produced unexpected result in 10g, you can still read the Note:345048.1 in Metalink to find some workarounds, for example by deactivating hash-group-by with _gby_hash_aggregation_enabled parameter set to false

Today is a good day, I have been accepted to the beta program and will be able to download 11gR1 beta 4 shortly.

There is a Confidential Disclosure Agreement, so do not expect to read more on 11g here before the production release.

My blog articles about 11g in OpenWorld 2006:
11g New Features
11g New Features part II

I successfully installed 10gR2 patchset 2 on my notebook :

SQL> select ACTION,VERSION,COMMENTS from registry$history;

ACTION  VERSION    COMMENTS
------- ---------- ------------------------------
CPU     10.2.0.2.0 CPUOct2006
UPGRADE 10.2.0.3.0 Upgraded from 10.2.0.2.0

SQL> select COMP_NAME,VERSION,STATUS from dba_registry;
COMP_NAME                           VERSION    STATUS
----------------------------------- ---------- -----------
Oracle Expression Filter            10.2.0.3.0 VALID
Oracle Database Catalog Views       10.2.0.3.0 VALID
Oracle Database Packages and Types  10.2.0.3.0 VALID
Oracle Database Java Packages       10.2.0.3.0 VALID
JServer JAVA Virtual Machine        10.2.0.3.0 VALID
Oracle XDK                          10.2.0.3.0 VALID

For Windows and Linux x86, Oracle Database 10.2.0.3 is available

download

check Oracle SQL Developer 1.1 Evaluation Release is Now Available!

PS: there is now a RPM for Linux, which I installed on my SLES 10 notebook with SUN JDK 1.6.

I just arrived at London. I was in the same plane as Mark Rittman and now I have to wait for my flight to Zurich.

On thursday after the Wrap’s party I went to China Town with Henry, and I finally entered the very close american xiangqi federation. I signed up for a free account at www.chinagames.net. Not an easy task ! there is not a single word in english in this site, and yesterday I tried on my notebook, but I do not have the chinese fonts installed, so it is quite a nightmare to download/register/login, but it is a good site, with tens of thousand of people online.

Ok. I will download the Oracle Enterprise Linux soon. It is actually a RedHat clone, as Whitebox, and I read on CNET that it may not be certified as RedHat for non-oracle products. If Oracle patches the kernel, you may lose the certification by other vendors, like Cisco or Checkpoint.

Also it reminds me the Sun Linux 2.0 initiative. A complete flop. Sun tried to tune RedHat on the LX50 blade, and finally the version of RedHat was so old (I think it was RedHat5, 2 Releases before the current one), that very few customers followed the trend.

Still I will wait a few months/years to see the market acceptance. Guess this announcement is going to make the Linux world more competitive

In the Metreon Theater, Quest announced toad 9. Steven Feuerstein presented one feature : Unit Testing in TOAD. Go to http://www.toadworld.com, unless you are a vi man

I like this one. It will really ease the migration to Linux. A very good news for me.

Go to oracle.com/linux

a new major release of the famous compression utility for windows is available as a beta
http://www.winzip.com/betawz.cgi

Better compression, RAR+Bzip formats extraction and more

I downloaded the CPUOct2006 patch for 10.2.0.2 and applied it successfully to my database.

SQL> select action,id,comments from dba_registry_history;
ACTION         ID COMMENTS
------ ---------- ----------
CPU       5490848 CPUOct2006

in the logfile, apart from a few ignorable ORA-02303: cannot drop or replace a type with type or table dependents errors, everything went fine.

Applying the security patch shortly after they are released is in my opinion a good practice, because a fix could sometimes reverse-engineered to reveal the bug.

Tomorrow afternoon I flight via London to SF for OOW2006. I am quite unhappy about not taking my notebook, my phone, not even a book or a SuDoKu in the plane Well, I hope BA will not refuse to serve me wine this time as Delta did last year

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.2)
Enterprise/Standard Edition for Solaris Operating System (x86)

Linux x86

Solaris Sparc 64bits
Solaris Sparc 32bits

Patchset 9.2.0.8 is out for a few plateform. I am quite surprised it did not come out on Solaris 32bits first, as I expected, but rather on the following

Microsoft Windows 32bits
Microsoft Windows 64bits
Linux Itanium
Linux x86_64
HP UX PA-RISC
IBM AIX5L
IBM z/OS (OS 390)

This is the terminal release of 9iR2

I read forums.oracle.com frequently. I have read and answered thousands of questions there.

Those days, they launched a new release, I do not know what the improvements are, but it is fairly unstable. Well, it has been worst in the past, but I keep getting We’re sorry, the server encountered an unexpected condition and timetouts occasionaly.

Another nightmare for users was the blank-trimming effect, it was hardly possible to format the post, all multiple spaces were trimmed to one space, even by using [code] or [pre]. It is now fixed!

There has been also two new icons, Usefull answer and Correct answer, but it has been removed already. It makes me remembers the smilies they introduced in a previous release, where :p bind variable was translated to a smile…

Problem with the downtime is that the experts go away. I post and read hundreds of messages on metalink, especially in sqlplus and plsql forums. The problem on metalink, lot’s of users expect to have an immediate and advanced answer from Oracle, because they pay for support, and they do not invest time to write the question properly nor to say please or thank you.

I recently start writing on the linux and oracle forums of developpez.net, where they put a high value on proper formatting, code of conduct, correct spelling (in french).

I successfully applied patch 5225799 on my notebook

SQL> select action,version,id,comments from dba_registry_history;
ACTION VERSION          ID COMMENTS
------ ---------- -------- ----------
CPU    10.2.0.2.0  5225799 CPUJul2006

I just received my Oracle Magazine yesterday. Blair Campbell from Oracle published my interview in the peer-to-peer columns.

Go to otn.oracle.com/oramag

Oracle Secure Backup is out. It enables the use encryption of backup on tapes, it can help you to save on media library costs (no need from a media manager any more).

Well, I am curious how many customer will take the challenge to migrate from tivoli or netbackup to oracle secure backup…

Oracle Release a solaris release for the intel/amd 64bits platform.

This is the first release ever from oracle on solaris x86-64.

Download Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.1.0) for Solaris Operating System (x86-64) now

isqlplus and sqlplusw (gui sqlplus windows) will be desupported in 2010. Read Note 359855.1 and Note 359859.1 on Metalink.

Oracle recommends migrating to Raptor (SQLDeveloper) or to Application Express (HTMLDB) or command line sqlplus.

Oracle Support apparently does not know that Raptor changed name before going to production, well, names change so often, it is difficult to know them all!

the patchset 1 of database 10gR2 is available on AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Linux and Windows yet.

download patch 4547817 on metalink

As a habit of changing name of everything, the catpatch sql script has been renamed to catupgrd

Well, it is now renamed to SQL Developer.

There is now an expected “Save password” checkbox to save the password… apart from the name, it looks quite similar to raptor

check on metalink for availability
patch 4505133

I am waiting for eomgc 10gR2 for AIX so I check the download page often. Instead of adding new plateforms, I notice they just removed Solaris !
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 2 (10.2.0.1) for Solaris Operating System (SPARC)

google cache

raptor product page

I have not checked the differences with 3.0 yet, probably bug fixes with “do not save passwords”

This is THE release I have been waiting for, a raptor which does NOT save the password on your local PC. Save a password, even encrypted, on you local PC allows every one with physical access to your PC to get access to your productive database, which may be high-secured and with controlled physical access.

Download immediatly on otn !

a few improvement described in the readme.txt. One of this is big-tnsfile support.

always missing is a way to NOT SAVE the password on the client!

solaris version now available
Entreprise Manager download (Solaris 32bits)

I just discovered that new interface today.

Hopefully, my old bookmarks still work.

I did not find the “Tar” button. Well, it is now named “Service Request”.

I tried the ORA-600 lookup tool, Doc id 153788.1
but it does not work today, both Firefox and Explorer failed.

MS Explorer reports a Java Script error.

document.forms.0.tool_type.value is null or is not an object

Just too sad… it is a very important tool. Anyway, I could search by using “ora-600 4883″ to find out what I am looking for.

I just found in my RSS feed that a new agent has been released. 10.1.0.4 for AIX5L. Well, if you go to the OEM download page, you will see only 10.1.0.2 version for AIX, HPUX, Solaris Sparc. But by clicking on the link, for example
Grid Control (10.1.0.2)
for AIX5L Based Systems, you will find a link OEM 10g Grid Control Management Agent Release 1, from there I finally discovered that 10.1.0.4 agent download.

Well, I already had 10.1.0.4, but it was a 10.1.0.2 installation patched with 10.1.0.4. So I prefer installing directly 10.1.0.4 agent.

Not trivial to found, but hopefully, I subscribed to RSS feeds on Newest Downloads

Oracle Enterprise Manager Downloads: oem download

this is a great announcement!