I’ve recently been asked to do some work on some 8i instances and it got me to thinking. When a new release roles out you instantly see all the new bells and whistles, but many of the minor improvements go unnoticed. By the same token, when you’ve been working with newer versions for a while, you forget how many things you are using that were minor improvements on previous versions.
I started working on this 8i stuff and found a bunch of my scripts didn’t work as they relied on columns that were added to DBA and V$ views in 9i and 10g. That wasted some time.
I always use DBMS_XPLAN to get my execution plans, but it’s not present in 8i, so I had to start using utlxpls.sql, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I had to modify it a bit. That wasted some more time.
I use some GUI tools for getting an overview of stuff, but some of these were not as backwards compatible as I would have liked. That wasted even more time.
The net product is, I ended up taking the best part of a day doing stuff that should have taken me a few minutes.
Now I like all the latest Oracle features as much as the next guy, but some of the most useful improvements don’t necessarily make it to the press releases. This experience makes me even more keen to see 11g. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…