AboutElliot Mak Expertise I can answer questions with regarding to Oracle DB (8i, 9i, 10g) installation, configuration, administration, Data Guard, and SQL.
Experience I am an Oracle DBA, Senior PA, Project Manager, and Data Architect with 10 years of experience.
Question dear Mark,
I have done oracle 8i a couple of years back.now i want to get a job on oracle. so I have to learn new versions like 9i and 10g. i want to know, are these versions too much different from 8i? please can you give some major differences between them.I could not install oracle 8i on windows XP. can you tell which OS it supports? and can I install oracle 9i and 10g on XP? Thanks a lot.
Answer Good day John,
There is quite a bit difference between 8i, 9i, and 10g. I will provide you their differences and web link for your reference at the end of my reply.
Here is the 8i supported Windows platform:
Windows NT 4.0 workstation, server and server enterprise
Windows 2000 Professional, Server, Advanced, and Datacenter
Windows 95
Windows 98
As for 10g, you have no problem installing on XP. I am currently running my testbed on my laptop, and it is working fine.
As for the differences between 8i and 9i, 9i and 10g:
Oracle 10g Release 2 (10.2.0) - September 2005
Transparent Data Encryption
Async commits
CONNECT ROLE can not only connect
Passwords for DB Links are encrypted
New asmcmd utility for managing ASM storage
Oracle 10g Release 1 (10.1.0)
Grid computing - an extension of the clustering feature (Real Application Clusters)
Manageability improvements (self-tuning features)
Performance and scalability improvements
Automated Storage Management (ASM)
Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)
Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM)
Flashback operations available on row, transaction, table or database level
Ability to UNDROP a table from a recycle bin
Ability to rename tablespaces
Ability to transport tablespaces across machine types (E.g Windows to Unix)
New 'drop database' statement
New database scheduler - DBMS_SCHEDULER
DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER Package
Support for bigfile tablespaces that is up to 8 Exabytes in size
Data Pump - faster data movement with expdp and impdp.
Oracle 9i Release 2 (9.2.0)
Locally Managed SYSTEM tablespaces
Oracle Streams - new data sharing/replication feature (can potentially replace Oracle Advance Replication and Standby Databases)
XML DB (Oracle is now a standards compliant XML database)
Data segment compression (compress keys in tables - only when loading data)
Cluster file system for Windows and Linux (raw devices are no longer required).
Create logical standby databases with Data Guard
Java JDK 1.3 used inside the database (JVM)
Oracle Data Guard Enhancements (SQL Apply mode - logical copy of primary database, automatic failover
Security Improvements - Default Install Accounts locked, VPD on synonyms, AES, Migrate Users to Directory
Oracle 9i Release 1 (9.0.1) - June 2001
Traditional rollback segments (RBS) are still available, but can be replaced with automated System Managed Undo (SMU). Using SMU, Oracle will create it's own "Rollback Segments" and size them automatically without any DBA involvement.
Flashback query (dbms_flashback.enable) - one can query data as it looked at some point in the past. This feature will allow users to correct wrongly committed transactions without contacting the DBA to do a database restore.
Use Oracle Ultra Search for searching databases, file systems, etc. The UltraSearch crawler fetch data and hand it to Oracle Text to be indexed.
Oracle Nameserver is still available, but deprecate in favour of LDAP Naming (using the Oracle Internet Directory Server). A nameserver proxy is provided for backwards compatibility as pre-8i client cannot resolve names from an LDAP server.
Oracle Parallel Server's (OPS) scalability was improved - now called Real Application Clusters (RAC). Full Cache Fusion implemented. Any application can scale in a database cluster. Applications doesn't need to be cluster aware anymore.
The Oracle Standby DB feature renamed to Oracle Data Guard. New Logical Standby databases replay SQL on standby site allowing the database to be used for normal read write operations. The Data Guard Broker allows single step fail-over when disaster strikes.
Scrolling cursor support. Oracle9i allows fetching backwards in a result set.
Dynamic Memory Management - Buffer Pools and shared pool can be resized on-the-fly. This eliminates the need to restart the database each time parameter changes were made.
On-line table and index reorganization.
VI (Virtual Interface) protocol support, an alternative to TCP/IP, available for use with Oracle Net (SQL*Net). VI provides fast communications between components in a cluster.
Build in XML Developers Kit (XDK). New data types for XML (XMLType), URI's, etc. XML integrated with AQ.
Cost Based Optimizer now also consider memory and CPU, not only disk access cost as before.
PL/SQL programs can be natively compiled to binaries.
Deep data protection - fine grained security and auditing. Put security on DB level. SQL access do not mean unrestricted access.
Resumable backups and statements - suspend statement instead of rolling back immediately.
List Partitioning - partitioning on a list of values.
ETL (eXtract, transformation, load) Operations - with external tables and pipelining.
OLAP - Express functionality included in the DB.
Data Mining - Oracle Darwin's features included in the DB.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have anything that I can help.
