The new Oracle 11g database has 482 new features, cutting across such areas such as manageability, high availability, scalability, content management, infrastructure and business intelligence. The key theme of 11g is to provide “change assurance”. The following is a glimpse of a subset of all the new features:

• Compression technology that can reduce the amount of storage required for data sets by up to two thirds
• Speed boost allowing Oracle to finally beat file systems on reading data
• Data Guard - the ability to create a standby snapshot for the purpose of regression testing and to keep it in sync with your production database
• Replay Workload - the ability to capture all (or just SQL) database activities and then moving it to a testing environment without using a midtier tool
• Online Application Upgrades - hot patching, the ability to install upgrades or patches online with no downtime
• Quick Fault Resolution - the ability to capture of all diagnostics related to a fault automatically
• Database Repair Advisor - a wizard/expert system that guides DBAs through the fault diagnosis and resolution process
• Partition by logical object and automated partition creation to help manage Very Large Databases (VLDBs)
• New high-performance Large Objects (LOB) infrastructure
• Native Java & PL/SQL compilers
• Re-engineered driver for PHP