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  • Ansible tips’n’tricks: configuring the Ansible Dynamic Inventory for OCI – Oracle Linux 7

    I have previously written about the configuration of the Ansible Dynamic Inventory for OCI. The aforementioned article focused on Debian, and I promised an update for Oracle Linux 7. You are reading it now. The biggest difference between the older post and this one is the ability to use YUM in Oracle Linux 7. Rather…

  • Device name persistence in the cloud: OCI + Terraform

    This is a really short post (by my standards at least) demonstrating how I ensure device name persistence in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Device name persistence matters for many reasons, not the least for my Ansible scripts expecting a given block device to be of a certain size and used for a specific purpose. And…

  • Oracle Database Cloud Service: Create a database from backup using Terraform

    A common DBA task is to ensure that a development-type environment is refreshed. In a typical on-premises case a “dev refresh” involves quite a bit of scripting in various programming languages. Whilst that’s a perfectly fine approach, it can be done a lot simpler when you consider the use of the cloud. My example uses…

  • Creating custom database binaries in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) enables users to run the database in many different ways. Starting with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployments all the way to Autonomous Database (ADB), you can choose the offering that suits you best based on how much control you want to retain (or give up). While researching Oracle’s Database Cloud…

  • Installing Ansible on Oracle Linux 8 for test and development use

    I have previously written about installing Ansible on Oracle Linux 7 for non-production use. A similar approach can be taken to install Ansible on Oracle Linux 8. This is a quick post to show you how I did that in my Vagrant (lab) VM. As it is the case with Oracle Linux 7, the Extra…

  • Ansible tips’n’tricks: run select parts of a playbook using tags

    I have recently re-discovered an Ansible feature I haven’t used in a while: tagging. Ansible allows you to define tags at various places of your playbook. On its own that wouldn’t be terribly useful, except that you can pass tags to ansible-playbook causing the interpreter to selectively run tasks tagged appropriately. My example uses Ansible…

  • Terraform tips’n’tricks: debugging data sources and testing interpolations

    I have previously blogged about the use of Terraform data sources to fetch information concerning Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) resources. The documentation is pretty good, but sometimes you may want to know more about the data returned. This post describes a potential way to debug output of a data source and to evaluate interpolations. Do…

  • Terraform tips’n’tricks: getting the latest Oracle Linux 8 image OCID programatically

    This post is a direct follow up to the previous one where I shared how I used a Terraform data source to fetch the latest Oracle-provided Oracle Linux 7 cloud image identifier. This time around I’d like to fetch the latest Oracle Cloud ID (OCID) for Oracle Linux 8. It’s a different approach and instead…

  • Terraform tips’n’tricks: getting the latest Oracle Linux 7 image OCID programatically

    As with all cloud providers you need to specify an operating system image when creating virtual machines using Terraform in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This can either be an Oracle supplied image, or a custom image you built. This post describes how to fetch the most recent Oracle-provided image for Oracle Linux 7 in Terraform.…

  • A mostly academic post about startup triggers and when they fire in Real Application Clusters

    Out of curiosity I wanted to figure out when and how often startup triggers fire in RAC 19c. Do they fire when all instances of the database are up (e.g. only once), or do they fire for once each instance? A little experiment reveals the behaviour. As the title reads this is mostly academic, I…