What's New

With the release of Easysoft ODBC-Oracle Driver version 3.x, Easysoft has created a new standard for ODBC connectivity to the Oracle® database. This document describes the additional features added since the last major release of the driver, and discusses the benefits that these features bring to the user.

Transparent Application Failover (TAF) Support

Transparent Application Failover (TAF) is a mechanism that enables client applications to automatically reconnect to a node of a RAC database cluster following a connection failure. There may be a delay associated with failing over to another node. To keep users informed and give them the option to interrupt the failover process, it is possible for an OCI application to register a callback function that is invoked in the event of a connection loss and during the course of the failover.

The Easysoft ODBC-Oracle Driver now enables ODBC applications to register a failover callback function.

See Also

Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) Support

Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) is a scalability feature introduced in Oracle® 11g Release 1, which uses a combination of dedicated server and connection broker to handle short, transient sessions coming from Web applications. DRCP is especially relevant for architectures with multi-process, single-threaded application servers, such as PHP and Apache, that cannot do middle tier connection pooling.

The Easysoft ODBC-Oracle Driver now enables ODBC applications to configure the behaviour of DRCP. ODBC applications can:

To configure DRCP, use the Pool_Purity and Pool_Connection_Class Easysoft ODBC-Oracle Driver attributes.

See Also

Oracle® 11g Support

The Easysoft ODBC-Oracle Driver now connects Linux, Unix and Windows applications to Oracle® 11g Release 1+.

Supported Oracle® 11g features include:

Wire Protocol Driver

Easysoft now provide a Wire Protocol (WP) version of the Oracle® ODBC driver, which provides clientless, direct access to Oracle® 8–11g.

Performance

Although the driver was previously one of the quickest available, we have improved the performance of the driver such that the fetching of data may now be 300% faster. This performance increase has been gained by analysis of typical use patterns and subsequent optimisation of the Oracle® API calls. No additional changes are required to existing application code to take advantage of this extra performance, and there are no potential hidden costs to slow down other operations.

Oracle® Feature Support

Additional support has been added for the following Oracle® features:

Installer

The following changes have been made to the Unix installation:

Data Type Support

The following additional data types are supported:

New API Calls

Support has been added in the driver for the following ODBC API calls:

New SQL Features

Positioned updates and deletes can now be done using "SELECT ... FOR UPDATE OF" statements.

Fixes to Problems

Over 40 minor problems have been fixed in this release. These are detailed in the CHANGES.txt file included in the installation.


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