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0 Today I discovered the 9.0.4.5 maintenance release for Oracle Designer 10g on MetaLink. It has been released on November 18th, so this is not hot news. The 9.0.4.5 is not yet available on OTN’s Designer Software Page, there you will still find 9.0.4.4. If you have an existing Designer/SCM 10g release on your machine (either Oracle Designer 10g (9.0.4.3) shipped with Developer Suite 10g (9.0.4) or the release 9.0.4.4), use this download to upgrade Designer/SCM to release 10g (9.0.4.5). Install into the same Oracle home as your existing release, then run the RAU to upgrade the repository.
If you do not have an existing Oracle Designer/SCM 10g release on your machine, you must first install Oracle Developer Suite 10g (9.0.4) and then proceed as for upgrading.
The download is 340 Mb, Client Side install is a breeze and the Server Side upgrade requires only a few minutes.
The 9.0.4.5 and 9.0.4.4 releases, compiled from Metalink.
One remarkable piece of new functionality is a performance enhancement based on the VPD or Fine Grained Access Control facilities in the 9i Enterprise Edition that replaces te rather expensive workarea-context resolution currently in place.
Oracle Designer/SCM 10g (9.0.4.5) will automatically incorporate performance
enhancements into the repository during upgrade if your dataabse has RLS (row
level security) enabled. This will affect the way thay you import a full
repository dump if the name of the database owner performing the import is
different to that of the exporting repository owner. Please install the
Designer/SCM client and read the release notes for full details BEFORE running
the RAU repository upgrade as the additions of the performance enhancements
and use of RLS is an irreversible action. Note that you can prevent the
these changes from happening by denying execute permissions on DBMS_RLS to the
repository owner (“repos owner”).
I have had some feedback from the field that indicated that this performance enhancement actually slowed the system substantially down. Apparently, if after doing this upgrade you are faced with poor performance, you may consider switching of this particular performance enhancement.
Related posts:
Enabling Role-based security management in Oracle Designer 6i/9i/10g through the Repository Object Browser Great Oracle Forms 'plugin' – multirecord table column resize/sort/move around 
Poor man's VPD – Virtual Private Database before 8i and in Standard Edition Databases Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) in PL/SQL – Is it hot? Is it cool? Or utterly useless? Dynamic SQL Pivoting – Stealing Anton’s Thunder
