In catching up on blog posts I see that Jonathan Lewis, Christian Antognini and Nuno Souto picked up on the deferred segment creation new feature in Oracle 11gR2. In keeping with the theme, I thought I’d put together the top 10 new features in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) that I consider significant.

1. Analytic Functions 2.0
2. Recursive WITH Clause
3. Preprocessing Data for ORACLE_LOADER Access Driver in External Tables
4. In-Memory Parallel Execution
5. Auto Degree of Parallelism (Auto DOP) and Parallel Statement Queuing
6. Significant Performance Improvement of MV On-Commit Fast Refresh
7. Database Resource Manager Instance Caging
8. ASM Intelligent Data Placement
9. Database File System (DBFS)
10. Hybrid Columnar Compression

In future posts I’ll dive into some of these in more technical detail but for now I thought I’d throw my list out there to raise awareness of the things I am looking at as a database performance engineer.