Oracle Call Interface

Oracle Call Interface (OCI) is the most comprehensive, high performance, native 'C' language based interface to the Oracle Database that exposes the full power of the Oracle Database. OCI provides the foundation on which various language specific interfaces such as Oracle JDBC-OCI, ODP.Net, Oracle Precompilers, Oracle ODBC and Oracle C++ Call Interface (OCCI) drivers are built. OCI is also used by leading Open Source interfaces such as the PHP OCI8 extension, ruby-oci8, Perl DBD::oracle and Python cx_oracle. OCI being the native interface to the Oracle Database also powers queries, statements and calls issued by the Oracle Database kernel internally. Various Oracle tools such as SQL*Plus, Real Application Testing (RAT), SQL*Loader and Data-Pump are also OCI based. In addition, Oracle In-Memory Database Cache (IMDB Cache a.k.a. TimesTen) supports OCI and Oracle Pro*C/C++ Pre-compilers. Oracle Instant Client gives ISVs and customers the ability to quickly install and deploy Oracle applications. See the Oracle Instant Client site for more information.

A broad range of customers including Fortune 500 customers and ISVs employ OCI directly for developing high performance applications.

What's New in Oracle Database 11g R1 & 11g R2

The new features in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 include:

• Ease of Day-Light Savings Transition (DLST) Upgrades: Support for different version of Timezone files on clients and servers under certain scenarios
• DRCP available to custom connection pools; and better connection monitoring support for DBAs.
  • new gv$cpool_conn_info view
• Non-intrusive Performance Acceleration thru Table Annotation for Client-side Query Result Cache
• Ref Cursor Pre-Fetching - saves roundtrips to the database
• 64-bit Integer Host Datatype for OCI Bind and Define calls

The new features in Oracle Database 11g Release 1 include:

• OCI and Precompilers support for In-Memory Database Cache 11g (formerly TimesTen)
  • IMDB and IMDB Cache integration
• Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP)
• Query Change Notification
• Client Query Result Cache
• Runtime Connection Load Balancing in OCI Session Pool
• Binding and Defining Multiple Buffers in a single call
• Implicit Fetching of Rowids in SELECT ... FOR UPDATE
• Prefetching of LOB data
• SecureFiles LOB APIs
• XDB Binary XML
• Drop-in compatibility with 10g
• Fault Diagnosability

Technical Information Oracle Database 11g Building High Performance Drivers for Oracle (PDF) Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) (PDF) Oracle Database 10g Using Microsoft Intellisense for OCI in Oracle 10g Application Failover in Oracle Database 11g Transparent Application Failover Oracle9i Database Oracle9i Database Release 2 New Data Access Features Oracle9i Database Release 1 New Data Access Features OCI Scrollable Cursors (PDF) Boosting SQL Performance with cursor_sharing (PDF)