Welcome 11g

Yesterday Oracle Türkiye was our guest and we talked on the new features of the new release. Below you will find some presentations which summaries why you might want to migrate to 11g.

Creating test environments was one of our chronic problems and with 11g Standby Snapshots and Real Application Testing(RAT) features, managing testing quality will be much more easier for us. Also real time physical standby database feature for reporting purposes is another great feature.

11g on Linux will be download able from OTN this month and I also hope we will be enjoying a new free Express Edition(XE) version soon.

10g Release 2 is a great release for our needs and each day I continue to learn new things about it, but this is for today of course.

Also I still believe in second releases :) I hope you also enjoy the 11g new features –

11g General New Features
11g Application Development New Features
11g Manageability New Features
11g Very Large Database New Features
11g High Availability New Features
11g Grid and OLTP New Features
11g Real Application Testing New Features
Why 11g? (In Turkish)New Features

You may also want to visit these 11g references –

Oracle 11G database on OTN
Mr.Arup Nanda is again preparing one of his great top features series for 11g
Amis Blogs on 11g new features
psoug.org started publishing 11gR1 demos

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Unload Data with External Tables and Data Pump

Before 10g External Tables were used to read external data into destination database but after Oracle 10g external tables can be created as a CTAS(Create Table As Select) operation, which enables a one-time unloading of inside data.

This is NOT a native data unloader(no more sqlplus spools, UTL_FILE writes, Pro*C unloaders etc). Oracle supplied a new access driver called “ORACLE_DATAPUMP” and Oracle will “unload” an external table to a format only usable by the Data Pump utility another new 10g feature to replace traditional imp and exp. So generating an ASCII or CSV file from external tables is NOT possible, at least for today :)

Below is a simple demonstration of how to dump the data from the ALL_SOURCE view to a file.

Code Listing 107-External Table Write Demo

The log file can be avoided using the NOLOGFILE keyword, but contains usefull information such as the time the file was opened and any error messages that occur during the creation or read-back of the external table.

For more information and examples please see this fantastic paper as usual by Oracle ACE Howard Rogers – Creating External Tables with Data Pump

Testing Information : the scripts mentioned are tested on Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.3.0

Refences Used :
Oracle® Database Utilities 10g Release 2 (10.2) – Chapter 1 Overview of Oracle Data Pump – External Tables Part