Oracle 11g - 1st impression

I've installed the newest version of Oracle Database 11g (11.1.0.6.0) on a vmware-system and searched for new things for developers.

First thing is that Oracle now checks upper- and lowercase passwords..
older versions works with DES and the 11g release use SHA-1. I noticed this because my sys and system-user have the "masterkey" for password and I've defined "Masterkey" on installation

They have optimized the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database. I looked into this nearly real time data caching in Oracle 10g and wonder about the next step in performance.

Really new is IMO the Database Resident Connection Pooling. This feature allows multiple middle tiers to share the same connection pool and provides improved scalability for Oracle customers. The new feature will be available through Oracle's Call Interface API (OCI).
An interesting feature especially for Ruby or PHP-developers, perhaps with Delphi.PHP or 3rd Rails from CodeGear.


I found in the PL/SQL-area a really cool thing with sequences (same like Generators in IB/FB): normally you must read the next value into a variable and this variable you can use for the ID-column in a trigger. With SQL-words it means:

Select SCHEMA_NAME.SEQ_T_EMP.NextVal into (a declared variable) xyz from dual;

with 11g you can minimize the coding in

xyz := SCHEMA_NAME.SEQ_T_EMP.NextVal;

Why have this simle way Oracle not earlier integrated, perhaps to simple for the developers in Redwood Shores ?!

I wonder about the publishing dates of a Oracle 11g XE Edition and the 11g-Edition for Windows and Solars/Sparc.
CodeGear have published the new database-framework dbx4 this year and consolidation the db-driver from many (bdp, dbx, bde/sql-links, ibx) to only this framework for win32 and .net (single source).
I think we'll see in the next time a dbx-driver that supports 11g offiicial.