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  • Introducing Packer: building immutable infrastructure in the cloud

    After having spent a bit of time with Packer to create Vagrant base boxes it was time to focus on the cloud. I have referenced Packer multiple times in my cloud talks as a popular way to create immutable infrastructure and/or custom images, and I wanted to share how you could potentially make use of…

  • Introducing Packer: building Vagrant base boxes hands-free

    I have referred to Packer in some of my cloud-related presentations as an example of a tool for creating immutable infrastructure. In addition to the cloud, Packer supports a great many other build targets as well. Since I work with VirtualBox and Vagrant a lot, Packer’s ability to create Vagrant base boxes is super awesome.…

  • JDBC & the Oracle Database: if you want Transparent Application Failover you need the OCI driver

    This is the second article in the series of JDBC articles I’m about to publish. It covers an old technology that’s surprisingly often found in use: Transparent Application Failover (TAF). It’s a client side feature for clustered Oracle databases allowing sessions (and to some extent, select statements) to fail over to a healthy node from…

  • JDBC & the Oracle Database: using Maven Central

    Over the years I have written a few blog posts about Java and the Oracle database. Most of these posts contained code in some form or another. And I have to admit that I haven’t been following my own advice … I have run into all sorts of issues with the code simply as a…

  • Using wallets with dbca in Oracle 19c

    One of the features I haven’t seen blogged about is the option to provide SYS and SYSTEM passwords (among other parameters) to dbca via a wallet. This is documented in chapter 2 of the Database Administration Guide 19c. [oracle@server1 ~]$ dbca -silent -createDatabase -help … [-useWalletForDBCredentials Specify true to load database credentials from wallet] -dbCredentialsWalletLocation…

  • Installing Virtualbox Guest Additions for Oracle Linux 8.2

    Since I can never remember how to install Virtualbox Guest Additions I thought I’d write it down. Maybe it’ll save you a few minutes; I know it will save me a lot of time ;) Update 230914 this procedure still works with Oracle Linux 8.8 guests. For this post I used the latest versions at…

  • Copying a SQL Plan Baseline from one database to another

    Hopefully this post saves you a few minutes looking the procedure up. I know it’ll save me some time ;) In this rather lengthy article I’d like to cover how I copied a SQL Plan Baseline from one database to another. If you find this procedure useful, please ensure your system is appropriately licensed for…

  • SQLDeveloper’s “mystats.sql” equivalent

    It just occurred to me that I haven’t blogged about SQLDeveloper yet, something I really need to change ;) This post covers SQLDeveloper 19.4, and although I don’t know exactly when the feature you are reading about was added I doubt it was in the latest release. A little bit of background first Sometimes the…

  • Silent installation: Oracle Restart 19c, ASM Filter Driver, UEK 5+ edition

    As promised in an earlier post here are my notes about installing Oracle Restart with ASM Filter Driver (ASMFD) 19c on Oracle Linux 7 using UEK 5. Update 210812: I successfully used the same approach for Oracle Linux 7.9/UEK 6. Since the approach you are about to read isn’t explicitly covered in the documentation I…

  • Versioning for your local Vagrant boxes: handling updates

    In my last post I summarised how to enable versioning for Vagrant box outside Vagrant’s cloud. In this part I’d like to share how to update a box. My environment The environment hasn’t changed compared to the first post. In summary I’m using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Virtualbox 6.1.6 Vagrant 2.2.7 Updating a box Let’s assume…