What's New in Oracle Call Interface?

The following sections describe the new features in Oracle Call Interface:

Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2) New Features in Oracle Call Interface

• Session Pooling

  See Also: "Session Pooling" "Connect, Authorize, and Initialize Functions" "Session Pool Handle Attributes"

• Statement Caching

  See Also: "Statement Caching" "Connect, Authorize, and Initialize Functions"

• Any Data Enhancements

  See Also: Enhancements "OCIAnyDataTypeCodeToSqlt()" "NCHAR Typecodes for OCIAnyData Functions"

• NCHAR and Codepoint Support for Objects

Objects can have NCHAR, NCLOB, and NVARCHAR2 attributes.

• Client Character Set Control

  See Also: "Client Character Set Control from OCI"

• Database Globalization Support

  See Also: "OCI Database Globalization Support Functions"

• Direct Loading using date_cache

  See Also: "Using a Date Cache in Direct Path Loading of Dates in OCI" "Direct Path Context Handle (OCIDirPathCtx) Attributes"

• New OTT Option: URL

  See Also: "URL"

• Structural changes to this document:

"Statement Functions" has been moved from chapter 15 to allow printed copies of this guide to remain in two volumes.

Oracle9i Release 1 (9.0.1) New Features in Oracle Call Interface

• Defining LOB Output Variables

This section has been re-written.

• Supporting UTF-16 Unicode

This discussion has been re-written.

• Advanced Queuing

Changes were made in the interfaces of publish-subscribe notification and in the OCI function OCISubscriptionRegister(). Several subscription handle attributes were modified and several were added. Open registration for publish-subscribe has been added.

• Direct Path Loading

Direct path loading of data into object columns as well as scalar columns, is now supported. Direct path loading is moved to chapter 12, so that it now appears after the discussion of objects and their use. Sections on binding and defining object datatypes are now at the end of chapter 11.

Oracle9i Release 9.0.0 New Features in Oracle Call Interface

This document has these new features. Each of these features is discussed in greater detail in the cross-referenced sections:

• Connection Pooling

This feature enables you to multiplex many logical connections over a single physical connection.

• Scrollable cursors.

Members of a result set can be accessed in non-sequential order.

• Globalization support.

Various OCI calls support UTF-16 for SQL statements, data, metadata, objects, and error messages.

• Middle-tier applications.

New attributes have been added for client authentication.

• New datatypes.

Datetime and Interval and Daylight Savings datatypes are described in the following sections:

• Any Type, AnyData, AnyDataSet.

An OCIAnyData encapsulates type information as well as a data instance of that type (that is, self descriptive data). An OCIAnyDataSet encapsulates type information as well as a set of instances of that type.

• Using LOB columns instead of LONG columns.

  See Also: "Runtime Data Allocation and Piecewise Operations" has been rewritten with new features for support of LOBs.

• Subtypes of objects can be defined.

  See Also: "Type Inheritance" "OTT Support for Type Inheritance"

• Type evolution.

How the attributes of types can be changed.

• Multilevel collection types.

Collections whose elements are collections.

• Externally initialized context.

An externally initialized context is an application context whose attributes can be initialized from OCI.

• Structural changes to this document:
  • Chapter 15 of release 8.1.6 has been split into chapters 15 and 16.
  • The sections in chapters 15 and 16 have been rearranged in a more logical order.
  • Chapters 17, 18, 19 were chapters 16, 17, 18 in release 8.1.6.
  • Chapter 20 has been added.

    See Also: See the section "Compatibility and Upgrading" for information about new calls that supersede existing routines. See the table of contents and the index for entries for the new features.

Oracle8i Release 2 (8.1.6) New Features in Oracle Call Interface

The 8.1 releases of OCI have the following new features and performance advantages:

• A revised callback mechanism has been implemented.
• A discussion of middle-tier authentication attributes is now in this guide.
• Cartridge service functions are now documented in this guide.
• Ability to create new object with non-NULL attribute values.
• Support for universal ROWIDs.
• Support for fixed-width Unicode.
• OCIThread package for thread manipulation.
• Ability to register user-created callback functions.
• Enhanced application failover processing ability.
• Support for publish/subscribe notification.
• No-wait locking option for objects.
• Ability to detect object changes when flushing.
• Support for temporary LOBs.
• Enhancements to LOB support.
• Enhanced array DML statement execution allowing all errors to be returned in a batch.
• Enhanced DML...RETURNING support.
• Ability to create objects based on object views or user-created object IDs.
• Support for nonblocking mode.
• Additional functional and performance enhancements.
• Publish-subscribe functionality for client notification of events.
• Direct path loading calls that provide access to the direct block formatter of the Oracle server.
• Reduced memory usage at runtime.
• Increased runtime performance with code reduction.
• Increased query performance with streamlined and more efficient fetch protocol.