What is the difference between Oracle 11i and 9i?

Question

I know from taking classes on 9i that it is Oracles database and we study archetect(spelling) and SQL and some storage, maintenance and performance strageies. But 11i was never spoken of. Lately, in interviews the 11i software has become relevant but not to my past studies. Can anyone clarify the difference between the two.

Answer 1

found on on metalink it says that version 9.4.2 has not been supported since 1997. 10.5 and 10.6 have not been supported since 2001. 10.7 not supported since 2003.
It looks like 11i is the only currently supported product and 11i.10 is the current version.

11i has been around long enough that there are desupport notices for some of the earliest 11i releases. That's rare for Oracle, usually they support the current major release. I expect a new major release of the Applications to go along with 10g prety soon. It'll probably be hinted at or announced at the next AppsWorld

Also 11i refers to the Oracle Applications - a suite of financial, human resources, manufacturing, and and accounting applications, not a database. The differences between 9i and 10g can be found here:

http://otn.oracle.com/pls/db10g/db10g.show_toc

Also found on on metalink it says that version 9.4.2 has not been supported since 1997. 10.5 and 10.6 have not been supported since 2001. 10.7 not supported since 2003.
It looks like 11i is the only currently supported product and 11i.10 is the current version.

11i has been around long enough that there are desupport notices for some of the earliest 11i releases. That's rare for Oracle, usually they support the current major release. I expect a new major release of the Applications to go along with 10g prety soon. It'll probably be hinted at or announced at the next AppsWorld.

Oracle 10g (like all Oracle releases) has heaps of features - most of which you don't care about. The thing Oracle hangs it hat on with 10g is Grid computing. I'm not using it so I don't care.

If you are a DBA, there's probably a lot of stuff in the new features guide that will interest you. As a developer / software designer using a non-Oracle front-end, the bits that interest me are:
- Extensions to the MERGE statement
- Extensions to CONNECT BY functionality
- The MODEL clause
- Table compression
- Improved support for partitioned IOTs
- A new front-end web deployment tool called Oracle HTML DB

For the nuts&bolts programmer, 10g is a bit of a disappointment after such things as:
- PL/SQL (6)
- Cost Based Optimizer, Stored Procs/Funcs/Triggers, Hash joins / Anti-joins, Bitmap indexes, MViews (7.x)
- Partitioned tables, Object Relational features(8.x)
- ANSI compliant SQL, MERGE statement, multi-table INSERT (9)

I've been using 10g (rel1) for about 8 months. I've found fewer bugs than in first releases of previous major versions, but it's not exactly NASA-rated. Hopefully 10.2 is a bit more stable

Answer 2

no difference