Oracle 10g

Oracle 10g was released at the beginning of 2004. The oracle marketing juggernaut had hyped the “g” of Oracle 10g for almost more than a year before its release. So I was eagerly waiting to install this grid once 10g was released. But to my disappointment this so called grid is not a tangible product that you can put your hands on, it is just a vague idea, a concept that the users should not be concerned about the whereabouts of the processing power they are receiving. So most of the features in Oracle 10g was geared towards helping users to realise this “grid” concept.

So my next step was to look at all these other features. Unfortunately most of the 10g features seems to be named by some committee. The once than have been continuously shoved down our throats by the oracle marketing giant are the features that I would never need to implement in my lifetime, consider for example the new feature of bigfile tablespace in 10g, where its possible to create a tablespace which can grow up to 128TB, impressive sure, useful to normal dbas like me , nah! Same can be said about the ability of database to grow upto 8,000,000 TB. Most DBAs would be impressed by these numbers but it would be mostly pointless for them to even consider it further.

Looking further into the new features guide, most of the new features seem to be lost in the acronyms swamps like ASM,ASSM,ASMM,ADDM,AWR and so on. Don't get me wrong, I really get exited with every new release of Oracle but it is really very difficult to get exited by a series of acrynyms.

Because of above mentioned reasons, I thought that 10g was the mostly hype and no substance, but as the time passed and the more I looked into 10g's new abilities, it dawned on me that 10g is not like any other database release from Oracle Corporation. Yes it is possible to use 10g in the same way as Oracle 9i and not see any difference.between the two releases. But if you implement all the features which Oracle 10g provides, a radically different picture of working with Oracle database emerges.

For example:

*Physical storage becomes transparent to users and infinitely expandable without any
downtime, if you care to implement ASM.

*Instance and SQL Tuning would become automatic thanks to ADDM and AWR.

*You can say goodbye to tuning your SGA, thangs to ASMM.

*Moving databases across platforms is a charm with Transporatable database and
transportable tablespace. (which now works across platforms)