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  • SQLcl autotrace is way more than “just” (SQL*Plus) autotrace

    As part of the research I did for the 2nd edition of our Exadata book I used session statistics quite heavily. Session statistics can provide additional insights in situations where the wait interface on its own doesn’t get you any further. On the command line, my tools of choice are either Tanel Poder’s excellent Session…

  • Installing instant clients on Oracle Linux 8 in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

    I recently presented my views on upgrading to Oracle 19c to the DOAG community. As part of that I pointed out how easy it was to deploy the Instant Client on a VM using yum and dnf. I previously wrote about the installation of the Instant Client in an on-premises configuration. UPDATE 250220: the post…

  • Installation of Oracle Restful Data Services 20.4 without using SYSDBA

    It’s really hard to come up with good, concise, and short twitter-compatible blog titles, so let’s try with a few more words. What I’d like to share is how to install Oracle Restful Data Services (ORDS) v20.4 without having to connect to the database as SYSDBA. There are good reasons not to connect as SYSDBA,…

  • Connecting to a database using SQLcl, a wallet and the thin driver

    I have previously written about the use of SQLcl and using an Oracle wallet (aka secure external password store). In my previous article I used the JDBC oci driver. This is perfectly fine, but as it’s based on Oracle’s Call Interface, it requires client libraries to be present. This time I wanted to use the…

  • New initialisation parameters for Transparent Data Encryption beginning in 19c

    This blog post is a short summary of my attempt to retrofit Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) into an existing Data Guard environment featuring a single-instance Oracle 19c Container Database (CDB) on a file system. Neither Oracle Restart nor Real Application Clusters are in use to keep the size of the article a little more manageable.…

  • Create a custom service in single instance Oracle 19c

    This post demonstrates how to create a custom service in a single instance Oracle 19c database. As per the Oracle 19c PL/SQL Packages and Types guide, this is the only Oracle database deployment option where you are allowed to use this technique. Anything to do with high availability rules this approach out straight away. The…

  • Swingbench: creating benchmark schemas with strong passwords

    This post describes my experience creating the SOE user account in an Oracle 21 database provided by Oracle’s Database Cloud Service (DBCS). The same principle should apply for earlier releases as well, at the end of the day it boils down to the use of Oracle’s password verify functions. To avoid any ambiguity: the use…

  • 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…