Data Warehousing and VLDB Support

Data Warehousing and VLDB Support

Materialized Views – Provide faster data warehouse queries by creating a stored summary of pre-calculated results.
Transportable Tablespaces – Allows you to move tablespaces between databases.
Direct Path Load API – New OCI interface allows the creation of applications that can take advantage of the fast direct load which in the past was only available to the SQL*Loder program.
New OLAP aggregate functions available in the GROUP BY clause – ROLLUP and CUBE. Provide the ability to compute subtotals and cross-tabulations across dimensions.
FROM SAMPLE clause – Results based upon a random sample from the whole table.
Function based indexes – Allows you to create an index on a function. Has a significant positive impact upon performance!
DESC keyword is not ignored on the create index clause anymore.
New ALTER TABLE clause for bitmapped indexes - MINIMIZE RECORDS PER BLOCK and NOMINIMIZE RECORDS PER BLOCK.
Parallelization of Aggregate Distinct Queries
Sort Improvements – Dropped the following init parms: SORT_DIRECT_WRITES, SORT_WRITE_BUFFERS, SORT_WRITE_BUFFER_SIZE, SORT_READ_FAC, and SORT_SPACEMAP_SIZE. Added the following new init parm: SORT_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT.
Single Table Hash Cluster
New DBMS_STATS package for managing and manipulating statistics.
Improvements and enhancements to Automated Parallel Query Tuning.
New Constraint Administration – Can modify and disable existing constraint options.
Enhancements to administration of index-organized tables – Full table functionality that includes LOB support, support for more than one index, can be rebuilt online, and create table...as select. Addition of logical rowid’s for faster access.