Additional Features

Oracle 10g also includes the following OLAP DML features:

• New attachment program

  In Oracle 10g, you can create a new attachment program named ONATTACH that will execute before any other attachment program. Frequently, this program is used to specify the attachment mode for individual analytic workspace objects when an analytic workspace is attached in multiwriter mode.

  
  

  See: ONATTACH

  
  

• Improved error handling when reading files

  In Oracle 10g, you can specify the behavior of Oracle OLAP when an error is reached when reading from a file using an INFILE statement.

  
  

  See: INF_STOP_ON_ERROR

  
  

• Additional support for the OLAP_TABLE function used in SQL

  In Oracle 10g, you can set an upper limit on the size of a data block generated by a FETCH statement specified in the OLAP_command parameter of the OLAP_TABLE function in SQL.

  
  

  See: MAXFETCH

  
  

• Extended support for embedded SQL

  In Oracle 10g, you can select data from relational tables into analytic workspace objects without using an explicit cursor.

  
  

  See: SQL SELECT

  
  

• Additional sort choices

  In Oracle 10g, statements used for sorting were modified to allow you to sort by hierarchy and to specify whether NA values appear first or list in the sorted list.

  
  

  See: SORT, LIMIT command (with SORT keyword)

  
  

• New SQL-like text and numerical functions

  In Oracle 10g, a number of functions that are familiar to SQL programmers were added to the OLAP DML.

  
  

  See: ARCTAN2, ASCII, BITAND, COALESCE, DECODE, EXP, GREATEST, INITCAP, INSTR, INSTRB, LEAST, LPAD, LTRIM, NULLIF, NVL, NVL2, RPAD, RTRIM, SIGN, SUBSTR, SUBSTRB, TRIM, and WIDTH_BUCKET

  
  

• Change in default display of long error messages.

  Beginning in 10.2, by default, long error messages are not wrapped when displayed. When you want the previous default behavior which is to display long error messages as multiple lines with each line being 72 characters in length, set the WRAPERRORS option to YES.

• Additional keywords in the AW function and OBJ function that let you retrieve more information about Oracle OLAP and your analytic workspace.

• Additional support for using the current status list rather than the default status list.

  By including the new STATUS keyword you can compute the depreciation expenses for a series of assets, the interest portion of the payments on a series of loans, or a payment schedule for paying off a series of installment loans using based on the current status list.

  
  

  See: DEPRDECL, DEPRDECLSW, DEPRSL, DEPRSOYD, FINTSCHED, FPMTSCHED, VINTSCHED, VPMTSCHED