In what version did Oracle add that feature?

Steven Feuerstein — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 18:08:00 GMT

I get this question a lot. I am teaching a class and a student asks: "When did Oracle add autonomous transactions?" Or the INDICES of clause. Or – who knows what?

Seeing as I am totally obsessed with PL/SQL, I usually actually remember the answer to such questions.

Occasionally, however, I do not. And of course I cannot always be there for you to answer such a question when you have it.

So I thought I would pass along a tip – a way to quickly determine the version in which a feature was introduced to Oracle.

It is called "Tahiti.Oracle.com," and it is one of my favorite websites for Oracle development. Check it out – you will find all of Oracle's documentation on-line and fully searchable!

Here's what you will see when you visit this site:

Look at that! They even offer documentation for Oracle8i – a version that is no longer even officially supported.

From this home page you have two basic choices:

· Search for information for a particular keyword or phrase.
· Drill down into the documentation for a given version.

All the documentation is available in HTML and PDF format; you can save the PDF files to your local disk and then have them available at any time.

So, now back to the title of this blog: "In what version did Oracle add that feature?"

I am at this moment flying back from Europe (departing from Bratislava) to Chicago after a whirlwind round of trainings and seminars in Prague (Czech Republic), Zagreb (Croatia), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Bratislava (Slovakia). While in Bratislava, a student asked me "When did Oracle add the INDICES OF feature for the FORALL statement?"

I knew it was Oracle 10g, but I could not remember if it was Release 1 or Release 2.

No worries! I opened up my browser, visited Tahiti, searched for "INDICES OF" across all the available document sets and then I saw this:

Which tells me that INDICES OF was added in Release 2, since Oracle Database 10g Release 1 does not even appear in this list.

Some people complain that Oracle charges too much for their software, that they only care about sucking every possible dollar out of their customers. Well...as a (very minor) shareholder of Oracle Corporation, a part of me is pleased as can be with that dynamic.

But please do also appreciate all that Oracle provides to its users without any cost. The Tahiti website of searchable documentation is certainly one of the most useful of its freely-available resources!

Steven Feuerstein's Blog

In what version did Oracle add that feature?