Diff between Oracle 8i and Oracle 9i

[DoubleH]

Hi,
Is there anything special that we need to look for while migrating from Oracle 8i to oracle 9i on an application's point of view. Is there any basic differences between 8i and 9i, that should be tested elaborately.

Thanks in advance,
DOUBLE H

 

[SantaMufasa]

Dub,

Oracle's strategy is typically to not disable syntactical features from previous versions. They very often ADD new syntactical support in major versions. But for existing applications, you should be fine. Obviously, I would run your typical (regression) tests that you would run for any application-code release, but I would be very surprised if there are any run-time surprises.

One thing that died with 8i is the DBA's buddy, "svrmgrl". All of svrmgrl's functionality has been in "sqlplus" for some time now, provided you log into SQL*Plus in this fashion:

sqlplus /nolog
connect / as sysdba

Also, Oracle de-supports certain init<SID>.ora parameters, but using them in your parameter file doesn't cause trouble, just a benign diagnostic.

A full disclosure of both new and de-supported features usually comes as part of your install set documentation.

Mufasa
(aka Dave of Sandy, Utah, USA @ 20:45 (27Jan04) GMT, 13:45 (27Jan04) Mountain Time)

 

[DoubleH]

Hi Musafa,
Thanks for the quick and effective reply. I am wondering where would I find the docs. Do you have the oracle technet URL docs link that has a link to the differences between oracle 8i and oracle 9i on a programmers point of view. When I searched I could find only the differences from DBA's point of view.

Thanks,
DOUBLE H

 

[ddrillich]

I just went through an upgrade from 8.1.6 to 9.2.0.4.
We tested our content management application for weeks on four different environments and found no problems.

What we did find was that the database work dropped almost in a factor of 300% based on a logical reads per second analysis. Our DBA attributes it to more efficient SQL execution plans after the upgrade.

Please note that we took the export/import path. Meaning we installed a fresh 9i instance and imported the content of the 8i instance.

Please also have a look at:
thread759-726739

Regards,
Dan

 

[AOLEURO]

Hi

Anything that can go wrong may go wrong.

There are lots of changes between 8i and 9i.


You code might run efficiently if not making strange programming. But one big problem is always CBO. Several of your queries may behave differently. A lot of parameters now have a huge impact on CBO – one feature like OPTIMIZER_MAX_PERMUTATIONS (depends on other parameters) affects the number of joins orders considered by the optimizer. Before 9 it’s 80,000 and you can make it very small.

A 300% drop in database load (Dan reply) – it’s not common – rather the CBO now got more information during import – because the default settings is that import makes a ANALYZE on table and indexes if information is missing from importfile or just incorrect. So I think you did not have correct statistic in the old database.

Oracle says – create a 9i test environment and make comprehensive test before production.

You can always read on OTN how to do it – but you can read forever – Oracle has more than 100 books in 9i.


Regards
Allan
Icq: 346225948

 

[stevebooth]

One thing that I found when moving from 8i to 9i was that 9i was pickier than 8i when it came to discrepancies between Package Specification and Body. In as much as it was my fault they weren't the same, it was hard to blame Oracle.