What's the main difference between oracle 8i and 9i for 11i?

[SM_3]

thanks

[Graham Cameron_1]

About 1Gb for a vanilla install of each...
--
/app/oracle/product> du -sk *
2551201 817
3506112 920
--
Graham

[SM_3]

any other big differences?

[Graham Cameron_1]

Way too many to list.
See http://otn.oracle.com/products/oracle9i/index.html
In practical admin terms you can just upgrade without using any new features.
The big selling point from Oracle is high availability (RAC).
Things we're using here are:
-external tables (will replace sql*loader)
-locally managed tablespaces
-Advanced Queueing
-Streams
etc
-- Graham

[Jean-Luc Oudart]

Just a note :
Oracle8i desupport date is 31/12/2003 (ECS)
Extended support (ES) available to 31/12/2006 or Extended Maintenance support available to 31/12/2005.

For ES I think you need some specific contract with oracle

Rgds,
Jean-Luc

[Steven E. Protter]

8i the database. If you are doing a fresh install, don't use it. Support starts to end 12/31/2003 and is by expensive contract arrangement after 12/31/2005

9i Release two is current(9.0.2.x).

The primary technical difference you need to worry about is that the database does not use filesystems for storing data. It uses raw disk space. This presents a mirgration issue and managing space is a little more difficult.


As a sysadmin you are going to have to brush up on your sql because the primary interface with the database will be sqlplus and rman for backups.

SEP

[SM_3]

raw file systems?
oh dear

why is that?

[Carolina Merla]

Different sections of a single disk could be used for a boot area, file system, swap area, dump area, or raw data area.

This traditional built-in partitioning method is referred to as disk sectioning,
or "hard partitions".

With LVM, you do not use disk sections. Instead, you consider the disks as a
pool (or volume) of data storage, consisting of equally sized (by default 4
MB) extents, multiples of which are allocated for file system, swap, and other
purposes. LVM lets you specify extent size in megabytes.

For example, logical volume /dev/vg01/lvol1 might contain a file system,
logical volume /dev/vg01/lvol2 might contain swap space, and logical volume
/dev/vg01/lvol3 might contain raw data.

A file system is an area that you can use to group files and directories together for easy maintenance, you can expand, unmount or mount the hole file system.

Raw data is normally used by databases, in this case by Oracle, you can define your disk as raw only.

There is a very good class that covers this topics in Chapter 10 , it is the HP-UX System and Network Administration I H3064.

[Stan_17]

Jean, Steven

fyi...oracle have extended 8i ECS support for almost all platforms to 31st dec 2004. This happened on Oct 9th. check 250629.1 and 148054.1 metalink articles for complete listing of platforms supported.

-
Stan

[Graham Cameron_1]

I can't understand why Steven E Protter says you must use raw file systems.
That may be true if you are using RAC clusters, but for a conventional 9i database you can use the underlying filesystem just as you did on 8i. (and 7,6,5...).
Of course you *can* use raw files if you must, you always could, but you need not.
--

Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.3.0 - Production

SQL> select version from v$instance ;

VERSION
-----------------
9.2.0.3.0

SQL> select file_name from dba_data_files where tablespace_name = 'SYSTEM' ;

FILE_NAME
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/data/oradata_fst/icefst/system_01.dbf

SQL> !ll /data/oradata_fst/icefst/system_01.dbf
-rw-rw---- 1 oracle dba 629153792 Oct 15 05:02 /data/oradata_fst/icefst/system_01.dbf

--
Graham