New features in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) that I consider significant.

Adaptive Cursor Sharing in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Overcome the problems associated with using bind variables against indexed columns containing skewed data.

Automated Database Maintenance Task Management in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Reduce the impact of automated maintenance tasks on your system by controlling how and when they run.

Automatic Memory Management in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Oracle 11g takes the next step down the road to making manual memory management a thing of the past.

Automatic SQL Tuning in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Take advantage of the Automatic SQL Tuning features of Oracle 11g Release 1.

Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – This article provides an overview of the main Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1.

AWR Baseline Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Oracle 11g has extended the AWR baseline functionality and made alert threshold creation more flexible.

Case Sensitive Passwords in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Understand the implications and administration of this new security feature in Oracle 11g.

Cross-Session PL/SQL Function Result Cache in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Improve the performance of PL/SQL functions across the whole database instance by caching return values.

Database Replay in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Capture workloads on a production system and replay them exactly as they happened on a test system.

Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP) in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Use the database resident connection pool to reduce the resource requirements of applications that do not support connection pooling.

Data Recovery Advisor in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Automatically identify, diagnose and repair corruption or loss of persistent data on disk using this new feature.

DDL With the WAIT Option (DDL_LOCK_TIMEOUT) – Avoid unnecessary “ORA-00054: resource busy” errors in 11g.

Fine-Grained Access to Network Services in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Take control of the external services accessed by the UTL_TCP, UTL_INADDR, UTL_HTTP, UTL_SMTP, and UTL_MAIL packages.

Finer Grained Dependency Management in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – See how finer grained dependency management in 11g reduces the extent of invalidations associated with schema changes.

Flashback and LogMiner Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – See how Oracle 11g Release 1 makes tracking data changes and recovering from logical errors easier because of enhancements to Flashback and LogMiner.

Invisible Indexes in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Take control of the indexes available to the optimizer by using invisible indexes in 11g.

Miscellaneous New Features in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – A collection of new features and enhancements listed in the miscellaneous section of “Oracle Database 11G: New Features for Administrators” OCP syllabus.

Online Table Redefinition Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Take advantage of the reduced invalidations associated with online table redefintions in 11g.

Partitioning Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – An introduction to the partitioning enhancements in Oracle 11g Release 1.

Query Result Cache in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Improve the performance of SQL across the whole database instance by caching query results.

Read-Only Tables in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Protect data in static tables using the read-only table feature in Oracle 11g Release 1.

Resource Manager Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – An overview of the resource manager enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1.

RMAN Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – An overview of all the RMAN enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1.

Scheduler Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Oracle 11g adds more functionality to the Oracle scheduler.

SecureFiles in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Compress, deduplicate and encrypt LOBs using the new LOB functionality in Oracle 11g.

SQL Access Advisor in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Use this advisor to get suggestions for indexes, materialized views and partitioning schemes to improve system performance.

SQL Performance Analyzer in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Compare the performance of the statements in an SQL tuning set before and after database changes.

SQL Plan Management in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Maintain consistent SQL performance regardless of changes in optimizer version, optimizer statistics, schema changes, system settings and SQL profile creation.

Statistics Collection Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Provide the optimizer with additional selectivity information and avoid new statistics adversely affecting performance.

Table Compression Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Save space and improve performance of OLTP systems using the enhanced table compression in 11g.

Tablespace Encryption in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Simplify the administration of transparent data encryption (TDE) using tablespace encryption.

Temporary Tablespace Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 – Take advantage of better visibility and management of temporary tablespaces usage in 11g.

Upgrading to Oracle Database 11g – This article provides a brief overview of the areas involved in upgrading existing databases to Oracle 11g.