What's New in Oracle Database Upgrade Guide

This preface describes new features in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) and provides links to additional information.

Upgrade and Downgrade Enhancements

Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) continues to make improvements to simplify manual upgrades, upgrades performed using Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA), and downgrades. The following features reduce the complexity of database upgrades and reduce the total amount of time it takes to perform an upgrade:
- Improved pre-upgrade information—Additional improvements have been made in the areas of space estimation, initialization parameters, statistics gathering, and easier recovery. See the Pre-Upgrade Information Tool in the steps described in "Upgrade the Database".
- Simplified error management— Errors are now collected as they are generated during the upgrade and displayed by the Post-Upgrade Status Tool for each component. See the Post-Upgrade Status Tool in the steps described in "Upgrade the Database".
- Patchset upgrade/downgrades—The catupgrd.sql script performs all upgrades and the catdwgrd.sql script performs all downgrades, for both patch releases and major releases. See "Supported Releases for Downgrading".
General DBUA Enhancements
- DBUA will always configure Enterprise Manager Database Control in secure mode during upgrade (even if pre-upgrade is in nonsecure mode).
- The directory that you specify during the interview phase of Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) for ORACLE_BASE is stored in the Oracle home inventory. During the DBUA interview phase, ORACLE_BASE is displayed (and cannot be changed by the user) as follows:
  - If the ORACLE_BASE environment variable is set, then ORACLE_BASE is displayed as the ORACLE_BASE environment variable.
  - If ORACLE_BASE exists in the Oracle home inventory, then ORACLE_BASE is stored in the Oracle home inventory.
  - Otherwise, the ORACLE_BASE is stored in ORACLE_HOME.
  During the DBUA interview phase, by default, the DIAGNOSTIC_DEST initialization parameter (ADR directory) is displayed (can be changed by user) as ORACLE_BASE/diag and is used during subsequent directory creations.
DBUA Enhancements for Single-Instance Databases

DBUA provides the following enhancements for single-instance databases:
- Support for improvements to the pre-upgrade tool in the areas of space estimation, initialization parameters, statistics gathering, and new warnings.
- The directory that you specify during the DBUA interview phase for ORACLE_BASE is stored in the Oracle home inventory as the DIAGNOSTIC_DEST parameter and used during subsequent directory creations. (The default is the ORACLE_BASE/diag/ directory.)
  
  Note:
  The DIAGNOSTIC_DEST initialization parameter replaces the USER_DUMP_DEST, BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST, and CORE_DUMP_DEST parameters
- Support for upgrading Oracle Database Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) to Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1).
- Support for Automatic Storage Management (ASM)/Oracle File System (OFS) related features, such as moving data files to ASM or OFS or other storage devices such as (Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Area Storage (NAS) as part of upgrade.
- Option to make the connection to Enterprise Manager secure during database upgrade
- Automatic upgrade of Application Express
See Also:
DBUA online Help system and "Upgrade a Database Using Database Upgrade Assistant"
DBUA Enhancements for Oracle Real Application Clusters Configurations

DBUA provides the following enhancements for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) configurations:
- DBUA uses the value of DIAGNOSTIC_DEST parameter as the root directory where it automatically creates all of the relevant Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) subdirectories and metadata files. The names of the subdirectories are based on the user-provided database name and instance name. DBUA constructs the directory structure in a fashion similar to the following:
```
ADR_BASE_directory/rdbms/db_unique_name/instance_name
```
- DBUA supports upgrades from Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2.0.4) and beyond, Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1), and Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2).
- Starting with Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1), DBUA supports patchset upgrades of Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) software, as follows:
  - Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) places the 11g Release 1 (11.1) Oracle RAC metadata in the Oracle RAC database home.
  - OUI launches DBUA.
  - DBUA brings up all instances of the Oracle RAC database and collects all necessary information before the upgrade.
  - DBUA shuts down all instances and sets CLUSTER_DATABASE=FALSE.
  - DBUA brings up the local instance to run the SQL upgrade scripts.
- DBUA supports Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) improvements to the pre-upgrade tool in the areas of space estimation, initialization parameters, statistics gathering, and new warnings.
- DBUA creates restore scripts to restore the database, upon a user's request for a backup during the upgrade procedure. This restore script should incorporate necessary logic to update the /etc/oratab entries appropriately upon the downgrade.
- DBUA automatically restarts any services that were running prior to upgrade.
See Also:
DBUA online Help system and the Upgrade a Database Using Database Upgrade Assistant
SQL Plan Management ensures that plans do not degrade when upgrading to a newer database release

By maintaining a history of execution plans for a SQL statement, SQL Plan Management can detect a plan change. When SQL Plan Management detects a new plan, it marks the new plan for evaluation and uses the old (current good) plan. During the next maintenance window, SQL Plan Management validates the new plan. If it is found to perform better than the existing plan, then it is used in the future. If the performance has not improved, then the optimizer continues to use the old plan.

See Also:
SQL Plan Management and Control of SQL Plan Baselines
Stronger password protection

If you want to use the new Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) feature that enforces case-sensitive passwords, then you must reset the passwords of existing users during the database upgrade procedure. Strong password authentication will not be enabled for upgraded databases until each user password has been reset with the ALTER USER statement.

Note:
If the default Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) security settings are in place, then passwords must be at least 8 characters, and passwords such as welcome and oracle are not allowed. See Oracle Database Security Guide for more information.

See Also:
"Reset Passwords to Enforce Case-Sensitivity"
Binary XML support for Oracle XML DB

When the database is upgraded to Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1), none of the existing user XMLType tables and instances is modified. Existing tables can be altered and new tables can be subsequently created using the new storage format after the upgrade is completed. The XDB tables XDB$CONFIG and XDB$ACL and the corresponding XML schemas are migrated to binary XML storage when a database is upgraded to Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1).

See Also:
The section titled "Binary XML Support for Oracle XML Database" for compatibility information
WebDAV ACL Support in Oracle XML DB

There have been changes to the default behavior of WebDAV ACL (access control list) entries. Beginning with Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1), ACE order is irrelevant. The default behavior is determined only by the first <allow> or <deny> entry that is encountered. When upgrading to Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1), you might wish to reorder ACLs so that the <deny> entry occurs first if you want to retain the same behavior as previous releases.

See Also:
"Change in WebDAV ACL Evaluation Rulesin Oracle XML DB"
AUM Enabled by Default and Support for Upgrade from Rollback Segments

With Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1), automatic undo management is now enabled by default. (This is equivalent to setting the initialization parameter UNDO_MANAGEMENT=AUTO.) Also, a step-by-step procedure is available to help you upgrade your database from using rollback segments to using automatic undo management. As a part of the upgrade procedure, you can use a new function in that helps you to properly size the UNDO tablespace for each individual environment.

See Also:
"Migrate From Rollback Segments to Automatic Undo Mode"
Automatic Storage Management (ASM) supports rolling upgrades

Starting with Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1), you can perform a rolling upgrade of Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) software. You can perform rolling upgrades of your ASM software on ASM instances, one at a time, in an Oracle Clusterware environment while continuing to provide high availability.

See Also:
Rolling Upgrades
Automatic Storage Management (ASM) Manageability Enhancements

The new storage administration features for ASM manageability include the following:
- New attributes for disk group compatibility
  
  To enable some of the new ASM features, you can use two new disk group compatibility attributes, COMPATIBLE.RDBMS and COMPATIBLE.ASM. These attributes specify the minimum software version that is required to use disk groups for the database and for ASM, respectively. This feature enables heterogeneous environments with disk groups from both Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Database 11g. By default, both attributes are set to 10.1. You must advance these attributes to take advantage of the new features.
- New ASM command-line utility (ASMCMD) commands and options
  
  ASMCMD allows ASM disk identification, disk bad block repair, and backup and restore operations in your ASM environment for faster recovery.
- ASM fast rebalance
  
  Rebalance operations that occur while a disk group is in RESTRICTED mode eliminate the lock and unlock extent map messaging between ASM instances in Oracle RAC environments, thus improving overall rebalance throughput.
See Also:
"Advance the ASM and Oracle Database Disk Group Compatibility"
For complete information about ASM, see Oracle Database Storage Administrator's Guide
Data Mining Schema Objects

Data Mining models are now more similar to other database objects. This enables you to assign access privileges, audit operations and, in general, manage Data Mining models as full database objects.

Starting with Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1), the data mining schema is created automatically as part of catproc.sql under the SYS account. Existing data mining customers are able to upgrade to Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) from any previous release without major constraints and product compatibility between releases is strictly maintained.

See Also:
"Oracle Data Mining Models and the DMSYS Schema Objects" for compatibility information