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Oracle® Database Data Cartridge Developer's Guide, 10g Release 2 (10.2) Part Number B14289-02 |
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# What's New in Data Cartridges?

This section describes the new features of data cartridges, and provides pointers to additional information. Information on new features for the previous releases is retained to help users upgrading to the current release.The following sections describe new features:

- Oracle 10g Release 2 (10.2) New Features in Data Cartridges

- Oracle 10g Release 1 (10.1) New Features in Data Cartridges

## Oracle 10g Release 2 (10.2) New Features in Data Cartridges

There are no new features in this release.

## Oracle 10g Release 1 (10.1) New Features in Data Cartridges

New data cartridge features include:

- Extensible Indexing

- Extensibility Enhancements

### Extensible Indexing

Extensible indexing includes support for:

- Array inserts: In prior releases, inserting an array of values was not supported for domain indexes, thereby adversely affecting INSERT performance. An array of values can now be inserted in a batch using the ODCIIndexInsert interface.

- Parallel creation of local domain indexes: Local domain indexes deal with large amounts of data. Hence, the index creation time for local domain indexes was a bottleneck. Now, local indexes can be created in parallel (with inter-partition parallelism).

- ALTER OPERATOR: As the indexing scheme evolves, users might want to support additional operator bindings or remove redundant bindings. Support for ALTER OPERATOR add or drop binding allows for operator evolution.

- WITH COLUMN CONTEXT for operators: Frequently, the functional implementation for operators needs to look up the data structures that are associated with the column. However, for the functional implementation, there was no way to only pass the column information if there was no index defined on the column. Now, additional syntax is provided at the CREATE OPERATOR level to indicate that the functional implementation needs the column information to be passed in.Passing debugging information to the index implementation methods: Based on system level settings, the index type code sometimes needs to dump debugging information. A new system level event is introduced, which if set is passed in to the index type methods and the methods can then selectively dump the debugging information.

- INSERT AS APPEND: INSERT (with append hint) and maintenance of global and local domain indexes during partitioned table maintenance operations is now supported. Global and local domain indexes were previously marked UNUSABLE, whenever a partition maintenance operation was defined on the base table, thereby requiring users to rebuild the indexes or the affected index partitions. This restriction is now removed and both global and local domain indexes are now maintained along with the base table partition maintenance operations.

See Also: Extensible indexing enables you to implement your modes of indexing in addition to those that are built into Oracle. Chapter 7, "Using Extensible Indexing" Chapter 8, "Building Domain Indexes" Chapter 20, "Extensible Indexing Interface"

### Extensibility Enhancements

Enhancements to the pipelined table functions framework include:

- Projection information passed to the table function help it compute only the required attributes

- Integration with the extensible optimizer produces better query plans

- Support of anonymous return types for AnyDataSet table functions

See Also: The following chapters have been updated to reflect the modifications made for extensibility enhancements and the anonymous types and anonymous collection types. Chapter 13, "Using Pipelined and Parallel Table Functions" Chapter 19, "Extensibility Constants, Types, and Mappings" Chapter 21, "Extensible Optimizer Interface" Chapter 23, "Pipelined and Parallel Table Functions"