Oracle9i Database New Features
Release 1 (9.0.1)

Part Number A90120-02
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4
Deprecated and Desupported Features

This chapter lists features and functionalities of the Oracle database server that have been desupported or are planned to be desupported. It contains the following sections:

Overview of Deprecated and Desupported Features

This chapter contains a summary of deprecated and desupported features for Oracle9i. It also contains a summary of deprecated and desupported features in Oracle8 and Oracle8i for users who are migrating directly from Oracle7, or Oracle8, to Oracle9i.

Desupported features are features that are no longer supported in a release. Deprecated features are features that are not recommended for use because they are planned for desupport in a future release.

See Also:

Oracle9i Database Migration 

Oracle9i Desupported and Deprecated Features

This section contains the following topics:

The ANALYZE Statement

The DBMS_STATS package should be used to collect optimizer statistics instead of the ANALYZE statement. The ANALYZE statement may be desupported in a future release.

CONNECT INTERNAL

CONNECT INTERNAL and CONNECT INTERNAL/PASSWORD are not supported in Oracle9i. Instead, the following are the exact equivalents:

CONNECT/ as SYSDBA
CONNECT username/password AS SYSDBA

See Also:

Oracle9i Database Administrator's Guide for information about connection syntax 

C_Rep API

Server-side support for the client-side REP80.DLL has been removed. This DLL enabled replication between Oracle server and Oracle Lite. See the Oracle Lite documentation for information about replacement functionality.

Default Temporary Tablespace

If a temporary tablespace has not been created for a user, Oracle must have somewhere to store temporary data for that user. Historically, Oracle has used SYSTEM for default temporary data storage.

In Oracle9i, users are encouraged to define a default temporary tablespace when creating the database. If this is not done, SYSTEM will still be used for default temporary storage. However, a warning will be shown in the alert log saying that a default temporary tablespace is recommended, and may be necessary in future releases.

INCREMENTAL functionality of Export/Import

The INCREMENTAL functionality of Export/Import is being deprecated. This functionality exports an entire table if any row in the table has changed since the last INCREMENTAL export.

Users can still use the Export utility to selectively export tables. However, tables to be exported must be specified. Tablespace backups can be used if users want to backup specific tablespace, and not the entire database or schema, and if each table is placed in its own tablespace. A tablespace backup or recovery is faster than the equivalent table export or import.

National Character Set

The NCHAR datatypes (NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, NCLOB) have been redefined in Oracle9i to be exclusively Unicode datatypes. You can store Unicode characters into columns of these datatypes regardless of the database character set.

National character sets for Unicode datatypes (NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, and NCLOB) are limited to AL16UTF16 or UTF8. The default character set is AL16UTF16.

Also, the AL24UTFFSS character set has been replaced by the UTF8 character set.

See Also:

Oracle9i Globalization and National Language Support Guide 

Oracle Net Services (Net8) Unsupported Features

The following Oracle Net Services (formerly Net8) features are not supported in Oracle9i:

The desupport of these features allows configuration decisions for the Internet to be streamlined.

See Also:

Oracle9i Net Services Administrator's Guide 

Oracle Names

In future releases, Oracle Names will not be supported as a centralized naming method. Because no new enhancements are being added to Oracle Names, consider using directory naming or migrating an existing Oracle Names configuration to directory naming.

See Also:

Oracle9i Net Services Administrator's Guide 

User-Managed Tablespace Point-in-Time Recovery (TSPITR) on a Clone Database

In Oracle9i, the traditional method of user-managed tablespace point-in-time recovery (TSPITR) that used a clone database is deprecated. Only user-managed TSPITR with the transportable tablespace option is supported. Users are encouraged to use the transportable tablespace feature (TTS) to accomplish tablespace point-in-time recovery.

Relational Model of Oracle Spatial

The relational geometry model of Oracle Spatial will not be supported in a future release. Only the object relational model will be supported.

Information about the relational model has been removed from the Oracle Spatial User's Guide and Reference and placed in a separate manual, Oracle Spatial Relational Model Guide and Reference, which is available on the Oracle Technology Network. Users should immediately begin using the object-relational model.

See Also:

Oracle Spatial User's Guide and Reference 

Server Manager

Server Manager is not supported in Oracle9i. Use SQL*Plus instead. Most Server Manager scripts should work in a SQL*Plus environment, but some scripts may need to be modified.

See Also:

Oracle9i Database Migration for information about modifying Server Manager scripts 

Single-Task and Non-Deferred Linking

Single-task linking and non-deferred linking are not supported in Oracle9i.

See Also:

Oracle Call Interface Programmer's Guide 

FOR RECOVER Clause of ALTER TABLESPACE ... OFFLINE

The FOR RECOVER clause of ALTER TABLESPACE ... OFFLINE has been deprecated. The syntax is supported for backward compatibility. However, users are encouraged to use the transportable tablespaces feature for tablespace recovery.

VARCHAR Datatype

Use the VARCHAR2 datatype instead of VARCHAR. The semantics of the VARCHAR datatype may change in a future release.

See Also:

Oracle9i SQL Reference for information about datatypes 

Visual Information Retrieval

Oracle Visual Information Retrieval is not available in Oracle9i, and has been replaced by other image matching technology. In Oracle9i, image matching capability is available as part of interMedia.

Existing Visual Information Retrieval (VIR) applications will continue to be supported, but customers must convert the signature data and regenerate signature indices. Continued operation is facilitated by a VIR-compatible API that is implemented upon the new image-matching API. The VIR-compatible API is recommended for existing applications only and may be desupported in a future release. All new applications should be built using the interMedia image-matching API.

See Also:

Oracle interMedia User's Guide and Reference 

Desupported and Deprecated Initialization Parameters

This section contains:

Desupported Initialization Parameters in Oracle9i

ALWAYS_ANTI_JOIN

ALWAYS_SEMI_JOIN

JOB_QUEUE_INTERVAL

OPTIMIZER_PERCENT_PARALLEL

HASH_MULTIBLOCK_IO_COUNT

DB_BLOCK_LRU_LATCHES

DB_BLOCK_MAX_DIRTY_TARGET

SORT_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT

DB_FILE_DIRECT_IO_COUNT

GC_DEFER_TIME

GC_RELEASABLE_LOCKS

GC_ROLLBACK_LOCKS

LM_LOCKS

LM_RESS

USE_INDIRECT_DATA_BUFFERS

Deprecated Initialization Parameters in Oracle9i

ROLLBACK_SEGMENTS

FAST_START_IO_TARGET

TRANSACTIONS_PER_ROLLBACK_SEGMENT

LOG_CHECKPOINT_INTERVAL

DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS

BUFFER_POOL_KEEP

BUFFER_POOL_RECYCLE

Oracle8 and Oracle8i Desupported and Deprecated Features

This section contains the following topics:

Strings of Zero Length Not Equivalent To NULL

A string of zero length ('') is not equivalent to a NULL value. According to the ANSI SQL 1992 Transitional standard, a zero-length or empty string is not the same as NULL. Ensure that applications do not treat empty strings and NULL values equivalently.

Date Format Strings

In Oracle7, a space or punctuation character in the format string caused the corresponding character in the date string to be discarded. This caused incorrect dates to be entered into the database because alphanumeric characters were thrown out. In Oracle8i, an error occurs if an alphanumeric character is found in the date string when a punctuation character or space is found in the format string, as illustrated in the first row of the following table. The second row of the table displays an exception to the rule; the exception may be removed in future releases.

SQL Syntax  Oracle7 Result  Oracle8 Result 

TO_CHAR(TO_DATE('0297', 'MM/YY'), 'MM/YY') 

02/97 

ORA-1861 

TO_CHAR(TO_DATE('1996-05-19 12:37:48.196000',

'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS."00000"') 

 

1996-05-19 12:37:48 

Also, Oracle8 allows matching of certain dates which produced an error in Oracle7. This matching occurs only when the correct date can be determined without ambiguity. However, this matching does not occur if the format model modifiers FX or FXFM are used.

The new matching rules are:

The following example yields the result 05/25/1905 in Oracle8:

TO_CHAR(TO_DATE('May 25, 1905', 'MM/DD/RRRR HH:MI:SS'), 'MM/DD/RRRR')

See Also:

Oracle9i SQL Reference 

SELECT Privilege

The SELECT privilege may be required on tables that users update. Always grant the SELECT privilege to a user or role if you grant the UPDATE or DELETE privileges on the table.

See Also:

Oracle9i Database Reference and its discussion of the SQL92_SECURITY initialization parameter 

SERIALIZABLE=TRUE

The initialization parameter SERIALIZABLE=TRUE is not supported in Oracle8. The default behavior henceforth is as if SERIALIZABLE was set to FALSE. Use the SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE statement to achieve similar transaction isolation behavior.

ESTAT/BSTAT

BSTAT/ESTAT is not up to date with many of the new features introduced since 8.0, and eventually will be desupported.

Users who require help for performance tuning, and are running any release above Oracle 8.0, are asked to provide Statspack output rather than BSTAT/ESTAT. Statspack is much easier to interpret, provides more detailed information, and makes tuning faster and more effective.

Partition Views

Partition views are desupported in release 8.1.6. Instead, use partitioned tables.

Use of "THE (subquery)" Expression

In releases prior to Oracle8, the table_collection_expression clause was expressed as "THE (subquery)". That usage is desupported.

See Also:

Oracle9i SQL Reference 

The SGADEF File

The contents of this file have been deleted, but the file remains because its existence is required by the Oracle database server. Do not delete this file. It may be desupported in a future release.

LONG Columns

LONG columns may be desupported in a future release. You are advised to migrate LONG data into LOB columns.

Oracle Security Server and Cryptographic Toolkit

The Oracle Security Server and Cryptographic Toolkit products do not exist in Oracle8i and later, however their functionality has been integrated into Oracle Advanced Security and Oracle Internet Directory.


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