What's New in Oracle Database for Windows

This section describes new features of Oracle Database and provides pointers to additional information.

See Also:

Oracle Database New Features Guide for information on new features in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) that are not platform-specific

The following are the Windows specific new features:

Secure Database Services

In Oracle Database 11g Release 1, you can secure the Database Services data in the active directory, which is considered to be public. You can control the access to Database Services data by setting Access Control List (ACL) on it and allow only the authenticated users to access the data.

To use enhanced security in Oracle Database 11g, clients for Oracle Database 11g or later, need to configure for authentication binds. However, clients of the earlier releases cannot access Database Services after setting restricted ACLs.

Active Directory Security Enhancements

This feature enhances security through better integration with the default Active Directory configuration, adding support for OS authentication with Active Directory.

This feature improves Net Naming support for Microsoft Active Directory.

Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Writer

The Oracle VSS writer allows Oracle Database to participate in VSS-initiated backup and recovery on Windows 2003 and above. VSS is a Windows infrastructure composed of three participants:

  • Requestors - management applications that initiate backup and recovery

  • Writers - applications that own the data

  • Providers - storage/hardware applications that coordinate the reading and writing of the data to appropriate storage

Several leading backup and storage vendors currently provide requestor and provider applications. With the Oracle VSS writer, customers can reliably back up and recover Oracle data in a VSS environment, which interoperates with these vendors' components.

This feature provides full interoperability with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) infrastructure on Windows 2003 and above.

Note:

Windows data access client features are not included in this section.

Windows Vista Support

This release is supported on Windows Vista.

See Also:

"Starting Database Tools on Windows Vista"