Oracle OpenWorld 2018: Day 1

By Mouhamadou Diaw

The first session I assisted today was Oracle Active Data Guard: Best Practices and New Features Deep Dive.
This session was done by Nitin Karkhanis Director of Software Development managing the Data Guard Broker development team and Mahesh Girkar Senior Director of Software Development in Oracle’s Database Division. His team is responsible for developing High Availability features for Data Guard and Active Data Guard..
It was really a very interesting session. It was divided in two parts: The new features for 18c and new features they will implement for Oracle 19c.

Some Active Data Guard New Features for Oracle 18c

>Multi-Instance Redo Apply support now change block tracking
>Data Guard and Database Nologging mode
>The database buffer cache will be preserved on an Active Data Guard during role change
>Creating private temporary table is supported in Active Data Guard
>Better protection against failed logins

Some New Data Guard Broker Commands for Oracle 18c

Some New features for Data Guard in 19c

>Multi-Instance Redo Apply will work with the In Memory Column Store
>Global Temporary Tables can be now created and dropped in an Active Data Guard Standby
>Tunable Automatic Outage Resolution. The parameters that control the wait time that determine a hung process will be now documented
>DATA_GUARD_MAX_IO_TIME and DATA_GUARD_MAX_LONGIO_TIME. In former versions these parameters were hidden.
>In the future is flashback is done at the primary database no action will be needed on standby side. We just have to mount the standby
and Oracle will do the rest

Some Data Guard Broker Feature in 19c

TRACE_LEVEL replaces DEBUG

New Commands to Set Database Parameters

New command to export and import broker configuration file

Properties now pass through to Initialization Parameters
>DataGuardSyncLatency (DATA_GUARD_SYNC_LATENCY)
>StandbyFileManagement (STANDBY_FILE_MANAGEMENT)

Another session I attended was Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle RAC/Single Instance Database Environments presented by Bill Burton Consulting Member of Technical Staff Oracle
Scott Jesse Senior Director,Customer Support, DB Scalability, Security, Networking, SSC Oracle
Bryan Vongray, Senior Principal Technical Support Engineer, Oracle.
In fact according to their statistics more than 50% of opened SR concern well kown issues. So in this session they present some tools that can help for troubleshooting and monitoring RAC and Single Instance. They present
TFA
OraCheck and ExaCheck
By many illustrations, the speakers explain how to use the different tools to diagnose our environment.

The last session I attended was Inside the Head of a Database Hacker by Mark Fallon, Chief Security Architect, Oracle

The speaker tried in simple words to understand the motivations and the way the hackers act.
This will help to protect any environment. He comes to the conclusion that the security needs to be a collaboration
>Database Security
>Application Security
>Network Security
>End-point Security
>Process
>Employee Education
>Physical Security
>Supply Chain Security

So we will come back tomorrow for another briefing of our day