Cloud Control and the reappearing order column

I've been using OEM, grid control and cloud control for many years now and have been impressed how the product has evolved over time. In my opinion it's the best tool available for managing oracle and also for performance tuning (even better than sqlplus.....). As long as you have paid the $$$ to oracle of course for the appropriate diagnostics and tuning packs :-)

One of the things that irked me no end is that the explain plan screen. There are two things about this i don't like.

1) it defaults to the graphical view that i can't make sense of ( i still prefer the old style plan table view)
2) the 'order' column seemed to disappear between grid control and cloud control - for statements with complex plans this is a really useful column

Point 1) is still not fixable as far as i can make out - there is no way to customise the view of change any properties to make the old style view the default for a user - maybe the next release will fix that....

However for point 2 I'm pleased to report that the latest 'db plugin' (12.1.0.5 that is) has resolved this issue.

We run in disconnected mode due to some issue with proxy authentication that i won't bore you with - so i missed that 12.1.0.5 had been released. I ran the manual download of the catalog  from MOS and then uploaded that into the OMS which revealed the new plugin was available. I downloaded all 500MB of it and uploaded that as well.

I then deployed this to the OMS to check all would work OK - this seemed to do alarmingly more than the last db plugin i did - involving completely shutting down the OMS and doing loads of other stuff (it did warn this would happen).

Here is the screenshot of all the steps

And now magically the performance screen (in all databases not just the OMS DB) has the order column back in the plan window - brilliant.

I've still to deploy the plugin to all the other databases but i think this must just control what SQL it runs against the database to collect metric information. The look and feel of the performance screen seems to have been changed by the deployment to the OMS server which must do extra 'stuff'.

The screen shots below show before and after of the performance screen (this is 12.1.0.3)

And this is the new improved 12.1.0.5 with it's shiny new order column.