Searching list of changes between 8i and 10g

[BarbaraFuhrmann]

Hello,

we're now running 8.1.7 and are thinking about a new server with 64bit processing. Therefor oracle release has to be changed, too.
Due to the fact that we have to migrate anyway we plan to go directly to 10g. And that's my first question: Has someone just done that? Is it a good plan or are there reasons that tell better not to do and go to release 9 first?

To plan what migration means for us I'm looking out for a list of details that have changed between the releases in a manner that compatibility is no longer given.

I'll give an example of what I mean: the utl_file.fopen has been changed. In 8i the first parameter was a directory like '/xxx/yyyy/zzzzz', in 10g it is an object of type directory that has to be identified by it's name. Therefor we have to change every PL/SQL-Procedure that reads from or writes to a flat file.

Does someone have a list of changes like that??
The oracle "What's new" lists do not serve because they include a lot of added new feature. That may be interesting when we once have migrated but is to much to read for the moment.

Thank you
Barbara

 

[SantaMufasa]

Barbara,

I'm sorry that I do not have either a discrete listing of "Oracle 8i-to-10g new features" or specific links to produce such. There are, however, tons of sites resulting from a Google search of "Oracle 9i New Features" and "Oracle 10g New Features", which together should give what you need.

On the specific topic you mentioned of "...utl_file.fopen has been changed..." and "...we have to change every PL/SQL-Procedure that reads from or writes to a flat file..." I'm thinking there is a work-around that should avoid your needing to go back and changed every such reference. Since Oracle looks to the current schema first before looking outside the schema to resolve name references, I'll bet you could create a local version of "utl_file.fopen" that accommodates the "old" reference style, but then within its code accommodates the "object of type directory" and explicitly calls the "new" sys.utl_file.fopen packaged reference. What think ye?

Mufasa
(aka Dave of Sandy, Utah, USA @ 19:22 (28Jul04) UTC (aka "GMT" and "Zulu"), 12:22 (28Jul04) Mountain Time)

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

I am in the process of doing exactly that (going from 8.1.7 to 10.1.0) for our order entry system (why start with something important?. I don't see any reason why you'd want to do two migrations instead of one unless you're worried about having to work TARs w/OSS (a valid concern) instead of waiting for the bugs to get worked out in major patchsets.

couldn't you just dump dba_source and grep for references to packages w/changed APIs? I would think a fair amount of this could be done programatically. also, as long as you're looking at going through your code with a fine toothed comb why not ditch PL/SQL for PERL w/DBI and save youself this headache in the future?

 

[BarbaraFuhrmann]

Hi Santa,

thanks for your ideas.

The thing with the utl_file.fopen is realy complicated for us because in 8i a user can have the right to write to a directory that may has subdirectories and so he is allowed to write to each of the subdirectories.

We use this feature in some PL/SQL-Batches by generating a directory at runtime that contains among others the client's number and the current date.

As far as I understand it until now I have to create an object of type directory for every terminal path. This would mean for us to generate roundabout 20 objects of type directory per day, each one only used once. This is inconvinient and I wonder if you now a way to keep our flexibility as it is now.

Thank you
Barbara