In addition to updating the books for an incremental software release or a patch set release, Oracle revises its books regularly to incorporate bug fixes and value-added feedback from customers, product managers, support teams, and other key stakeholders. Every time a book is revised, the revision number of the book is increased by one and then published on Oracle Technology Network (OTN).This chapter lists the changes incorporated in this release.
New and updated features include the following:
Support of sophisticated pricing models such as peak/off-peak hour rates and a tiered pricing structure based on usage.
An Estimate Charges feature that enables you to see the effects of change to rates in a charge plan or to compare different charge plans.
A Plan Advisor feature that aids in deducing charge rates that make sense in terms of the entities and configurations for which the charge plan will be created. It also helps determine what to charge over time to recover investment costs.
Ability to make manual adjustments to charges.
Assign charge plans to entities or entity types using rules or by direct assignment.
Control charge plan and cost center inheritance.
Create and save searches to alter the display on the Entities tab, based on various filtering criteria.
For details, see Chapter 38, "Chargeback Administration."
New and updated features include the following:
The Enterprise Manager Consolidation feature now presents as two components: Host Consolidation Planner and Database Consolidation Workbench, each with its own navigation.
Capability to consolidate source databases (single instance or RAC) to fewer destination databases, using the database to database (D2D) consolidation type. Destinations can be existing databases (both non-CDB and CDB) or new databases on new servers, which can be Oracle Exadata Database Machines, Oracle Compute Cloud shapes, or generic servers.
Capability to consolidate source databases (single instance or RAC) to fewer servers where the number of databases stays the same, using the database to server (D2S) consolidation type. Destinations can be existing servers or new servers, which can be Oracle Exadata Database Machines, Oracle Compute Cloud shapes, or generic servers.
A new pre-configured consolidation scenario, Ultra Conservative that aggregates data based on the highest usage observed across the specified date range. This is the default for database consolidations.
An Advisor feature that gathers and evaluates performance data using rules to determine where bottlenecks might exist and advises how to relieve the problems.
A Compression Advisor feature that estimates how much compression source databases use in order to calculate how much space uncompressed data will require.
Ability to specify the ASM redundancy level and type of compression to use on the destination database.
Ability to implement a database consolidation scenario in real-time by migrating source databases to their mapped destinations, using supported migration methods.
Ability to assess the performance impact of database migration on SQL workload.
For details, see Chapter 39, "Enterprise Manager Consolidation."