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  • 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…

  • 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…