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  • Storing & retrieving sensitive data for your CI/CD pipelines securely

    On-premises edition. See below for a great article by Jeff Smith covering the other scenario where your database resides in Oracle Cloud. Secret management is a crucial part of your IT security strategy. Careless handling of secrets can leak these, and create security risks that are entirely avoidable. Hard-coding secrets, even for lab environments, is…

  • Observations concerning PostgreSQL transactional DDL and concurrency

    Recently, while browsing my feed on LinkedIn I came across a post dealing with PostgreSQL transactional DDL. Although I couldn’t find an exact documentation reference in the PostgreSQL docs (the closest I found is a reference to the transaction model in general) it is safe to say that you can wrap DDL statements into a…

  • Connecting to Oracle AI Autonomous Database with SQLcl the Easy Way

    Third-party tools don’t always offer much flexibility when connecting to Oracle AI Autonomous Database. In many cases, the connection code is fixed and can’t be modified. Many shell scripts follow a pattern similar to this, but this issue isn’t purely related to shell scripts. Java, Python, .Net, you name it, typically follow the username/password/connection string…

  • Oracle AI Database 26ai docs have become interactive

    Oracle AI Database 26ai documentation is becoming interactive ⌨️! Instead of copying SQL examples into your own environment (which you may have to set up…), you can now execute selected code snippets directly from the documentation using FreeSQL. You’ve probably heard about the great work that has gone into FreeSQL, allowing you to run Oracle…

  • Real productivity gains with AI: Automatic Workload Repository

    After setting the scene in the previous articles detailing the various components of the Modern AI Development Stack with Oracle AI Database at the centre, let’s put this environment to good use. Here’s a reference to the posts added for your convenience: Coding agents are surprisingly good at analysing technical artefacts, not just writing software. In…

  • Installing & Updating Oracle’s Agent Skills, the easy way

    In the previous article you were introduced to the Modern AI Development Stack with Oracle AI Database at its centre. This time, let’s look at one of the concepts in more detail: installing and updating Oracle Agent Skills. In an earlier article you read how to install and update Oracle Agent Skills either using npx…

  • Oracle Agent Skills, MCP, and the Modern AI Development Stack

    It seems like every week brings a new AI breakthrough that promises to change software development. The pace of innovation is accelerating rapidly, making it difficult to keep up with the latest tools, models, and workflows. Coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cline, and GitHub Copilot are built on top of large language models…

  • Server-side JavaScript is available on oracleapex.com

    Multilingual Engine (MLE) for JavaScript has been available to developers on oracleapex.com since the Oracle AI Database 26ai upgrade a few weeks ago. With the release of APEX 26.1, there is now an even better reason to explore a free APEX workspace and start experimenting with JavaScript directly in the database. In this short video,…

  • Using Podman and Docker Health Checks to Prevent CI Pipeline Failures

    I recently experimented with Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines in GitLab, and I needed a way to detect the availability of an Oracle AI Database 26ai Free instance running in Podman. Unless the database instance is available, any connection attempt will fail, causing the CI pipeline to abort unnecessarily. This article is based on Gerald Venzl’s…

  • Handling Secrets Safely in SQLcl Projects Deployments

    TL;DR: for security reasons you cannot possibly store sensitive information in Git. There have been too many occasions where API keys, passwords, or other configuration data has been exposed. Abused API keys in particular can become a cost nightmare, but so is any working username and password combination in the wrong hands. Security must not…