What's New in Oracle Net Services?

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) Addressing and Connectivity

This feature includes the following enhancements:

• IPv6 support for a single-instance database environment

• Session layer abstraction to support listening across all IPv4 and IPv6 interfaces

Oracle Restart

Oracle Restart enhances the availability of Oracle databases in a single-instance environment by restarting the database, the listener, and other Oracle components after a hardware or software failure or whenever your database host computer restarts. The components are started in the proper order, taking into consideration the dependencies among components.

Support for TRANSPORT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT and CONNECT_TIMEOUT at the description level in the connect string. These timeouts apply to each IP address that resolves to a host name.

• TRANSPORT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT specifies the time, in seconds, for a client to establish a TCP connection to the database server. The default value is 60 seconds.

• CONNECT_TIMEOUT specifies the time, in seconds, for a client to establish an Oracle Net connection to the database instance. This parameter overrides the SQLNET.OUTBOUND_CONNECT_TIMEOUT parameter.

CIDR and wildcard support for valid node checking.

The valid node checking list can include CIDR notation for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Wildcard format (*) is supported for IPv4 addresses.

Enhanced Network Administration Security

• Non-Anonymous LDAP Access for Net Naming

  Database administrators can now restrict access to a service by associating an access control list (ACL) with it. This feature can be used with installations that require an extremely high level of security.

  See "Configuring the Directory Naming Method" and "Configuring Database Access Control".

Performance Improvements

• New Oracle Net fastpath for the common usage scenarios significantly improves Oracle Net performance and is enabled by default in Oracle Database 11g. Users do not need to perform any configuration for this feature.

• Efficient network support for bulk data transfers, such as SecureFiles LOBs. This feature eases the notion of session data unit (SDU) and optimizes large data transfers over an Oracle Net connection by using new paradigms.

  See "Configuring Session Data Unit".

• PHP Scalability

  This feature adds Oracle Net support for efficient event-dispatch mechanisms on platforms that support them. This is internally enabled for PHP usage scenarios and users do not need to perform any configuration for enabling this feature.

Fast Reconnects for High Availability (HA)

• This feature adds a mechanism for efficient detection of terminated nodes and connect time failover. Configurable timeouts have been implemented at various levels.

Support for Database Resident Connection Pooling

• This feature enables you to share connections or sessions between multiple middle-tier processes

  See Also:

  • Oracle Database Concepts for additional information about database resident connection pooling

  • "About Database Resident Connection Pooling"

Enhancements to the Easy Connect Naming Method

For TCP/IP environments, you can simplify client configuration by using the Easy Connect naming method. The Easy Connect naming method simplifies network management by allowing clients to connect to Oracle Database services without first configuring net service names. Instead, clients make connections with the host name and optional port and service name of the database. See "Using the Easy Connect Naming Method".