Re: Is it just me?

"Daniel Morgan" <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:1076312298.396131_at_yasure...

>
> Good lord Howard what have you been reading? Or perhaps not reading.
>
> Recyclebin?

You mean the flashback past drop ability. Quite brilliant, I agree.

> ASM?
That one I also grant you. (Automatic Space Management). Could make things very much easier, and better performing too.

> ADDM?
Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor for those less familiar with the alphabet soup. Still not ball-grabbingly exciting. I've yet to recover from the torpor the 9i advisories induced in me.

> DataPump?

Can you really get excited about export on steroids? I can't. So I can now start an export job and disconnect from it, letting it run in the background. Wow! I used to minimise the terminal window to achieve the same thing, though.

> Grid

Uh huh. And how many people are actually going to end up using this wonder we call grid. If it reaches 20% of the install base, I'll eat my kippers cold. It's new, exciting and the buzz-word du jour, but it has relevance to... er, not too many. The ones it is of relevance to, of course, are the huge corporations that pay most of Oracle's bills, so good luck to them on that. But it's exotica -and it was well-trailed, too, so no real excitement even there.

>
> Surely you jest! This is ground-breaking.

No, it's all little iddy-biddy bits of nice-to-have convenience. Which is good, but not smashing. Take the business about glogin and login.sql being re-read after every connect, instead of only when SQL Plus is loaded... that's good, and has been on my personal wishlist for a while now. But it's hardly technologically ground-breaking stuff, is it?

I like the idea of transportable tablespaces across O/S platforms. That one's clever. I like the fact that flashback can go back past table drops -a brilliant way to avoid having to do incomplete recoveries. I like the fact that RMAN can be made to run in a particular maintenance window, and will throttle itself back and forth to achieve the backup in the desired time-frame. These are good things that will likely make a difference to an awful lot of people. But a flushable Buffer Cache? A log file size advisor? Yet another advisory to explain why materialised views won't fast refresh? These are all a bit of a yawn.

I'm being harsh, I realise. And probably not making any friends at a certain well-known corporation, either. I'm just saying this sounds like fleshing out of 9i, not a bold new step into a new version. The grid stuff is clearly brand new, and the '10' is almost certainly largely because of that... but apart from that...??

Regards
HJR

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