Managed service providers can finally roll out one simple method for starting single instance Oracle across all customers, rather than having to worry about the init scripts for HP-UX, Linux, Solaris (10)…

I’m not believing in the RAC One Node thing, there seem to be other (more cost effect) solutions to do similar things-to a degree. Steve Shaw gave an interesting presentation about Oracle VM & OCFS2 at the last UKOUG RAC & HA SIG and so did I some time ago.

Here are my favorite esoteric but useful new features so far:

1.4.1.18 Oracle Universal Installer Support for Removing Oracle RAC Installations
1.4.1.19 Improved Deinstallation Support With Oracle Universal Installer

These can be huge time-savers for RAC and GRID installations. It is sometimes impossible to know of an issue until an install is attempted. It is often quite
difficult to clean up. Many Oracle internal articles have been written to cover problems with failed installs. This should hopefully address most of them.

You are right, cluster-ware has changed significantly. One Node is interesting. Sounds like they (Oracle) are trying to take a bite out of Veritas’ pie. Clusterware has had the ability to automatically fail-over a stand alone instance for a while (albeit a manual scripting exercise). We actually had a client evaluating using it instead of re-upping Veritas support (which was a very hefty bill). It will be interesting to see if this “productization” takes off.

Although I’ve worked on a lot of RAC systems, configuring the clustering components are really not my strong suite (i.e. I’ve never actually done it). So I am probably not as appreciative of the advances in that area as I should be. Thanks for your comments.

Kerry

I do think the Editions thing holds great promise, but also great potential for misuse. It reminds of when Role based privileges were rolled out. For a couple of years I kept seeing these horribly complex security models using several layers of Roles granted to Roles granted to Roles. But hopefully we’ll see Editions used with a little common sense. The ability to easily isolate a particular release and non-destructively roll back the changes with a single command, all in a standardized way sounds like a God send to shops that are doing active development.

Kerry

Can you please explain that to the Peoplesoft, JDE and SAP developers, pretty please?
Because their 25000 empty tables and 32000 empty indexes sure don’t know about it…

It’s probably just me being an antsy dba type, but I do have trouble with the Edition thing -just like I have trouble with the whole multiple versions of the same library in application/os development.

I can on the other hand see great potential for the don’t preallocate storage feature since I see soooo many tables in COTS apps with large numbers (many thousands) of tables that are there for features of the app that won’t be used.

Niall

I think 11GR2 brings many exciting new features. Especially for RAC there are lots of interesting stuff that I think this release might be named 12g. Have a look at Rac OneNode, GNS and SCAN. These are very promising.