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Real productivity gains with AI: trace file analysis

I have been a database performance enthusiast for a long time, and I have spent a lot of time looking at Oracle database trace files. Depending on the level of database activity, this can become a time-intensive operation. These days, things might be easier, provided you are authorised to use AI tools for troubleshooting, which…
Life hack: don’t install an instant client out of habit, use the Database Free image!

I’m currently writing a small bash script to load a few WebAssembly modules into an Oracle AI Autonomous Database, configured with mutual TLS encryption. In other words, you need a wallet to connect to it. SQL Loader is a natural fit for loading a few discrete items into the database but … I don’t have…
Protecting ORDS REST Endpoints with OAuth 2.0-the Modern Way

I have previously protected Oracle REST Data Services endpoints using the OAUTH management APIs. These have been replaced with the ORDS_SECURITY APIs. You can read the desupport notice in the ORDS_SECURITY package documentation: Deprecation of OAUTH and OAUTH_ADMIN PL/SQL packages: Starting from Oracle REST Data Services release (ORDS) 24.3, the OAUTH and OAUTH_ADMIN PL/SQL packages…
WebAssembly in Oracle AI Database: image manipulation using photon

WebAssembly support is available with Oracle AI Database 26ai! The latest Release Update (RU), 23.26.4, adds another language to Oracle Database’s polyglot runtime, Multilingual Engine (MLE). As of today, MLE supports the following languages: JavaScript Typescript (must be transpiled before loaded into the database) WebAssembly (Wasm) The official announcement post promised examples, and this is…
Creating copies of your multi-TB databases doesn’t have to take forever

Back in the day when I worked as a production DBA I vividly remember all the coordination meetings that we held to ensure that the planned clone of our production database (2 TB at the time, which was huge for us) didn’t cause unwanted side effects. Our database ran as a two node Real Application…
ORDS 26.3.0 container image introduces a new mandatory environment variable

As a user of the Oracle REST Data Service container image I was interested to see version 26.3.0 appear in the Oracle Container Registry (🔗container-registry.oracle.com). While testing my existing Docker Compose setup, I found a change that affects new installations: the 26.3.0 image requires the ORACLE_USER_PWD environment variable when it installs ORDS for the first…
Downloading AutoUpgrade in Ansible playbooks

Mike Dietrich just announced a new AutoUpgrade release. If you haven’t heard about AutoUpgrade yet, you hit the right spot: it’s a pretty cool addition to any DBA’s toolbox. I use it all the time in Ansible, mainly because it makes installing an Oracle Home on a new server much much easier compared to the…
Setting initialisation parameters in Oracle AI Database Free container image

I recently had to troubleshoot a vector index creation problem on Oracle AI Database Free. To be totally honest upfront: the problem wasn’t Oracle – it was me. Here’s a short story about what happened and what I did to remedy the situation. I typically use {docker,podman}-compose to start my demo environments, because it’s the…
Generating SQL scripts using the VALUES clause

Oracle AI Database 26ai adds a table value constructor to SELECT, allowing VALUES to act as a small inline table in the FROM or WITH clause (📕 docs). This is useful when you want to work with a short list of values without creating a table or writing multiple UNION ALL queries. The VALUES clause…
Did you know about schema-only accounts?

Oracle 18c introduced schema-only accounts, and they are great for ISVs and anyone else who wants to contain all data and logic within the same schema. Most often you don’t want to grant direct access to such an application account, just to be safe. Prior to Oracle 18c you typically created an account with a…