DIAGONALIZABILITY, PERFORMANCE AND SECURITY IN 19C

Oracle Trace File Analyzer Support for Using an External SMTP Server for Notifications

In Oracle Database 19c, you can use an external Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server to receive Oracle Trace File Analyzer notifications.

In earlier releases of Oracle Trace File Analyzer, to deliver email notifications of alerts, you had to have monitored hosts configured with local sendmail or SMTP support. With external SMTP server notification support, Oracle Trace File Analyzer deployments can leverage complete notification functionality, helping to minimize downtime, and maximizing availability.

Oracle Cluster Health Advisor Integration into Oracle Trace File Analyzer

Oracle Trace File Analyzer now integrates with Oracle Cluster Health Advisor, and consumes the problem events that Oracle Cluster Health Advisor detects.

When Oracle Cluster Health Advisor detects a problem event, Oracle Trace File Analyzer automatically triggers the relevant diagnostic collection and sends an email notification. You can configure email notification through the standard Oracle Trace File Analyzer notification process.

Oracle Cluster Health Advisor provides early warnings for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) database and cluster node related performance issues. Oracle Trace File Analyzer sends email notifications with root cause analysis and corrective recommendations, which enables you to prevent application performance and availability issues proactively.

Oracle Trace File Analyzer REST API Support

Oracle Trace File Analyzer now includes RE presentational State Transfer (REST) support, which enables invocation and query over HTTPS.

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) is included within the installation to facilitate REST support. REST supports printing details, starting a diagnostic collection, and downloading collections.

The REST interface enables you to configure remote management, and automate data center operations. Oracle Trace File Analyzer when operating through REST APIs supports easy integration into your operations framework and thus improves diagnostic efficiency and reduces recovery time.

Oracle Trace File Analyzer Search Extended to Support Metadata Searches

Starting in this release, metadata stored in the Oracle Trace File Analyzer index is searchable using tfactl.

Oracle Trace File Analyzer searches log and trace file metadata using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formatted name-value pairs representing data types and events.

The ability to search log and trace file metadata is essential to minimize downtime and maximize availability and to efficiently diagnose and triage issues, especially the recurring issues across instances and nodes. In earlier releases of Oracle Trace File Analyzer, the search function was limited to log and trace file strings.

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk REST Support

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk now include REpresentational State Transfer (REST) support, which enables invocation and query over HTTPS.

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) is included within the installation to facilitate REST support. The REST interface enables you to configure remote management, and automate data center operations. Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk, when operating through REST APIs, support easy integration into your operations framework and thus improve diagnostic efficiency and reduce recovery time.

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk Support for Encrypting Collection Files

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk diagnostic collection files may contain sensitive data. Starting in this release, you can encrypt and decrypt diagnostic collection ZIP files and protect them with a password.

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk collections and their reports can include sensitive data. When you email or transfer these reports to repositories, it is critical that only the intended recipients can view the sensitive data. To prevent leaks, you can restrict access to sensitive data by encrypting the diagnostic collections and protecting them with a password. This feature is available only on Linux and Solaris platforms.

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk Support for Remote Node Connections Without Requiring Passwordless SSH

Starting in this release, you can configure Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk to autogenerate the private key files for the remote nodes. Alternatively, you can provide a private key.

You can perform operations remotely to centrally manage many database servers or clusters. In many cases, corporate policies prevent passwordless Secure Shell (SSH) configuration. Using the private key authentication, you can run Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk remotely in these deployments and improve operational efficiency. In earlier releases of Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk, remotely running Oracle ORAchk or Oracle EXAchk required configuration of passwordless SSH between the remote nodes.

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk Now Show Only the Most Critical Checks by Default

Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk generate reports and show only the most critical checks by default.

The critical checks are those that have the most severe potential effect. Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk still run all other checks and include them in the report. You can view the checks by selecting the appropriate option under the Show checks with the following status control.

In earlier releases of Oracle ORAchk and Oracle EXAchk, reports contained over one hundred checks and thus made the analysis more time-consuming. With the most critical checks, you can analyze the reports efficiently, and quickly resolve critical problems and prevent downtime or performance issues.

Oracle Trace File Analyzer Supports New Service Request Data Collections

This release adds additional database Service Request Data Collections (SRDCs) that cover more ORA errors and problems in the infrastructure such as Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM), Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS), listeners, auditing, and Recovery Manager (RMAN).

When operations or Oracle Database issues occur that require Oracle Support Services, it is important that you collect and send all of the data and logs necessary to diagnose and resolve the issue in one compact complete archive. SRDCs simplify the collection of required logs and data for specific issues.

Performance

SQL Quarantine

SQL statements that are terminated by Oracle Database Resource Manager due to their excessive consumption of CPU and I/O resources are automatically quarantined. The execution plans associated with the terminated SQL statements are quarantined to prevent them from being executed again.

This feature protects an Oracle Database from performance degradation by preventing execution of SQL statements that excessively consume CPU and I/O resources.

Database In-Memory Wait on Populate

The DBMS_INMEMORY_ADMIN.POPULATE_WAIT function waits until objects at the specified priority have been populated to the specified percentage.

The new function ensures that the specified In-Memory objects have been populated before allowing application access. For example, a database might contain a number of In-Memory tables with a variety of priority settings. In a restricted session, you can use the POPULATE_WAIT function to ensure that every In-Memory table is completely populated. Afterward, you can disable the restricted session so that the application is guaranteed to query only In-Memory representations of the tables.

Resource Manager Automatically Enabled for Database In-Memory

When INMEMORY_SIZE is greater than 0, Oracle Database Resource Manager is automatically enabled.

The Resource Manager is required to take advantage of In-Memory Dynamic Scans. Because the Resource Manager is automatically enabled when Database In-Memory is enabled, you receive the benefits of enhanced performance and automatic management for CPU resource allocation.

Memoptimized Rowstore Fast Ingest

The fast ingest functionality of Memoptimized Rowstore enables fast data inserts into an Oracle Database from applications, such as Internet of Things (IoT) applications that ingest small, high volume transactions with a minimal amount of transactional overhead. The insert operations that use fast ingest temporarily buffer the data in the large pool before writing it to disk in bulk in a deferred, asynchronous manner.

Using the rich analytical features of Oracle Database, you can now perform data analysis more effectively by easily integrating data from high-frequency data streaming applications with your existing application data.

High-Frequency SQL Plan Management Evolve Advisor Task

You can configure the Automatic SPM Evolve Advisor task to run every hour, outside of the standard maintenance window.

By evolving SQL plan baselines more frequently, the optimizer can correct performance regressions more quickly and enforce more optimal SQL execution plans.

Dynamic Services Fallback Option

For a dynamic database service that is placed using "preferred" and "available" settings, you can now specify that this service should fall back to a "preferred" instance when it becomes available if the service failed over to an available instance.

The Dynamic Services Fallback Option allows for more control in placing dynamic database services and ensures that a given service is available on a preferred instance as long as possible.

Transparent Online Conversion Support for Auto-Renaming in Non-Oracle-Managed Files Mode

Starting with this release, in a Transparent Data Encryption online conversion in non-Oracle-managed files mode, you are no longer forced to include the FILE_NAME_CONVERT clause in the ADMINISTER KEY MANAGEMENT SQL statement. The file name retains its original name.

This enhancement helps prevent you from having to rename files to the original name, sometimes missing files.

Support for Additional Algorithms for Offline Tablespace Encryption

In previous releases, only the AES128 encryption algorithm was supported for offline tablespace encryption. This release adds support for the AES192 and AES256 encryption algorithms, as well as for the ARIA, GOST, and 3DES encryption algorithms for offline tablespace encryption.

This enhancement helps in scenarios in which you have concerns about auxiliary space usage required by online tablespace encryption.

Support for Additional Algorithms for Offline Tablespace Encryption

In previous releases, only the AES128 encryption algorithm was supported for offline tablespace encryption. This release adds support for the AES192 and AES256 encryption algorithms, as well as for the ARIA, GOST, and 3DES encryption algorithms for offline tablespace encryption.

This enhancement helps in scenarios in which you have concerns about auxiliary space usage required by online tablespace encryption.

Privilege Analysis Now Available in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition

Privilege analysis is now available as part of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.

Privilege analysis runs dynamic analysis of users and applications to find privileges and roles that are used and unused. Privilege analysis reduces the work to implement least privilege best practices by showing you exactly what privileges are used and not used by each account. Privilege analysis is highly performant and is designed to work in test, development, and production development databases.

As part of this change, the documentation for privilege analysis has moved from the Oracle Database Vault Administrator's Guide to the Oracle Database Security Guide.

Support for Oracle Native Encryption and SSL Authentication for Different Users Concurrently

In previous releases, Oracle Database prevented the use of Oracle native encryption (also called Advanced Networking Option (or ANO) encryption) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) authentication together.

For example, if you set both the SQLNET.ENCRYPTION_CLIENT parameter on the client and the SQLNET.ENCRYPTION_SERVER parameter on the server to REQUIRED, and a TCP/IP with SSL (TCPS) listener is used, then you receive the ORA-12696 Double Encryption Turned On, login disallowed error. Starting with this release, you can set the new SQLNET.IGNORE_ANO_ENCRYPTION_FOR_TCPS parameter to TRUE. This setting ignores the SQLNET.ENCRYPTION_CLIENT or SQLNET.ENCRYPTION_SERVER when a TCPS client is used and either of these two parameters are set to REQUIRED.

Ability to Grant or Revoke Administrative Privileges to and from Schema-Only Accounts

You can grant administrative privileges, such as SYSOPER and SYSBACKUP, to schema-only (passwordless) accounts.

Unused and rarely accessed database user accounts with administrative privileges can now become schema-only accounts. This enhancement prevents administrators from having to manage the passwords of these accounts.

Automatic Support for Both SASL and Non-SASL Active Directory Connections

Starting with this release, support is available for both Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) binds for Microsoft Active Directory connections.

For centrally managed users, the Oracle Database initially tries to connect to Active Directory using SASL bind. If the Active Directory server rejects the SASL bind connection, then the Oracle Database automatically attempts the connection again without SASL bind but still secured with TLS.

The Active Directory administrator is responsible for configuring the connection parameters for Active Directory server, but does not need to configure the database to match this new Active Directory connection enhancement. The database automatically adjusts from using SASL to not using SASL bind.