What's New in Application Development?

This section describes new features of the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) and provides pointers to additional information. New features information from previous releases is also retained to help those users migrating to the current release.

The following sections describe the new features in Oracle Oracle Database 10g:

• Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) New Features

• Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1) New Features

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) New Features

This section discusses new features introduced in Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1).

• Regular expression enhancements

  This release adds SQL support for common Perl-based extensions that are not included but do not conflict with the POSIX standard.

  
  

  See Also: Chapter 4, "Using Regular Expressions in Oracle Database" for more information

  
  

• Unicode datatype literal enhancement

  You can avoid data loss if the database character set cannot represent all characters in the client character set.

  
  

  See Also: "Using Character Literals in SQL Statements"

  
  

• Database Change Notification

  Database Change Notification enables client applications to receive notifications when the result set of a registered query changes. For example, if the client registers a query of the hr.employees table, and if a user adds an employee, then the application can receive a database change notification when a new row is added to the table. A new query of hr.employees returns the changed result set.

  Database Change Notification supports both mid-tier caches and server-side stored procedures. For example, a stored procedure that performs DML on registered tables can automatically send change notifications to a mid-tier application, which can keep cached data up to date.

  
  

  See Also: Chapter 13, "Developing Applications with Database Change Notification"

  
  

• Asynchronous Commit

  Oracle Database enables you to change the handling of commit redo depending on the needs of your application. You can change the default COMMIT options so that the application does not need to wait for Oracle Database to write data to the online redo logs.

  
  

  See Also: "Managing Commit Redo Behavior"

  
  

• Automatic Undo Retention Enhancement

  This feature provides maximum retention for the fixed-size undo tablespace, thereby improving flashback capability as well as other statistic collection queries in which the query length is unknown.

  
  

  See Also: "Database Administration Tasks Before Using Flashback Features"

  
  

• Failover Improvements for Real Application Clusters (RAC) Distributed Transactions

  Distributed Transactions in a RAC environment detect failures and start the failover and failback processes automatically.

  
  

  See Also: "Using XA with Oracle Real Application Clusters"

  
  

• XML DB Web Services

  Enables direct access to the Oracle database through a native Web Service. Developers can write and deploy web services that can query the database with SQL or XQuery or execute stored procedures. You can access web services through the Oracle XML DB listener.

  
  

  See Also: "Overview of Oracle Database Web Services"

  
  

Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1) New Features

This section discusses new features introduced in Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1).

• Regular Expression Support

  A set of SQL functions introduced in this release let you perform queries and manipulate string data by means of regular expressions. Refer to Chapter 4, "Using Regular Expressions in Oracle Database" for more information.

• Oracle Expression Filter

  Oracle Expression Filter lets you store conditional expressions in a column that you can use in the WHERE clause of a database query. Refer to "Representing Conditional Expressions as Data" for more information.

  
  

  See Also: Oracle Database SQL Reference

  
  

• Native floating-point datatypes

  Column datatypes BINARY_FLOAT and BINARY_DOUBLE are introduced in this release. These datatypes provide an alternative to using the Oracle NUMBER datatype, with the following benefits:

  • More efficient use of storage resources

  • Faster arithmetic operations

  • Support for numerical algorithms specified in the IEEE 754 Standard

  Support for native floating-point datatypes in bind and fetch operations is provided for the following client interfaces:

  • SQL

  • PL/SQL

  • OCI

  • OCCI

  • Pro*C/C++

  • JDBC

    
    

    See Also: "Representing Numeric Data"

    
    

• Terabyte-Size Large Object (LOB) support

  This release provides support for terabyte-size LOB values (from 8 to 128 terabytes) in the following programmatic environments:

  • Java (JDBC)

  • OCI

  • PL/SQL (package DBMS_LOB)

  You can store and manipulate LOB (BLOB, CLOB, and NCLOB) datatypes larger than 4GB.

  
  

  See Also: For details on terabyte-size LOB support: Oracle Database Application Developer's Guide - Large Objects Oracle Call Interface Programmer's Guide

  
  

• Flashback

  This release has new and enhanced flashback features. You can now do the following:

  • Query the transaction history of a row.

  • Obtain the SQL undo syntax for a row and perform row-level flashback operations.

  • Perform remote queries of past data.

    
    

    See Also: Chapter 10, "Developing Flashback Applications"

    
    

• Oracle Data Provider for .NET

  Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) is a new programmatic environment that implements a data provider for Oracle Database. It uses APIs native to Oracle Database to offer fast and reliable access from any .NET application to database features and data. ODP.NET also uses and inherits classes and interfaces available in the Microsoft .NET Framework Class Library.

  
  

  See Also: Oracle Data Provider for .NET Developer's Guide