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  • Oracle Restart 19c: silent installation and ASM Filter Driver

    Oracle 19c is has been getting a lot of traction recently, and I have been researching various aspects around its installation and use. One topic that came up recently was the installation of Oracle Restart 19c using ASM Filter Driver. ASM Filter Driver has been around for a little while, but I never really looked…

  • Passing complex data types to Ansible on the command line

    Earlier this year I wrote a post about passing JSON files as –extra-vars to ansible-playbook in order to simplify deployments and to make them more flexible. JSON syntax must be used to pass more complex data types to Ansible playbooks, the topic of this post. Unlike last time though I’ll pass the arguments directly to…

  • Printing all table preferences affecting dbms_stats.gather_table_stats

    Oracle 11g introduced the ability to control the behaviour of the dbms_stats package by setting preferences on the database, schema, and table level. These affect the way dbms_stats goes about doing its work. This feature has been extensively documented, I found the post by Maria Colgan exceptionally good at explaining the mechanism. I often have…

  • Ansible tips’n’tricks: defining –extra-vars as JSON

    While I’m continuing to learn more about Ansible I noticed a nifty little thing I wanted to share: it is possible to specify –extra-vars for an Ansible playbook in a JSON document in addition to the space-separated list of key=value pairs I have used so often. This can come in handy if you have many…

  • Initialising PL/SQL associative arrays in 18c and later

    I can never remember how to initialise PL/SQL associative arrays and thought I’d write a short post about it. This is primarily based on an article on Oracle’s Ask Tom site, plus a little extra detail from Steven Feuerstein. Associative arrays were previously known as index-by tables, by the way. Associative arrays before 18c Prior…

  • Vagrant tips’n’tricks: changing /etc/hosts automatically for Oracle Universal Installer

    Oracle Universal Installer, or OUI for short, doesn’t at all like it if the hostname resolves to an IP address in the 127.0.0.0/0 range. At best it complains, at worst it starts installing and configuring software only to abort and bury the real cause deep in the logs. I am a great fan of HashiCorp’s…

  • Tips’n’tricks: finding the (injected) private key pair used in Vagrant boxes

    In an earlier article I described how you could use SSH keys to log into a Vagrant box created by the Virtualbox provider. The previous post emphasised my preference for using custom Vagrant boxes and my own SSH keys. Nevertheless there are occasions when you can’t create your own Vagrant box, and you have to…

  • Tips’n’tricks: understanding “too many authentication failures” in SSH

    Virtualbox VMs powered by Vagrant require authentication via SSH keys so you don’t have to provide a password each time vagrant up is doing its magic. Provisioning tools you run as part of the vagrant up command also rely on the SSH key based authentication to work properly. This is documented in the official Vagrant…

  • Ansible Tips’n’tricks: rebooting Vagrant boxes after a kernel upgrade

    Occasionally I have to reboot my Vagrant boxes after kernel updates have been installed as part of an Ansible playbook during the “vagrant up” command execution. I create my own Vagrant base boxes because that’s more convenient for me than pulling them from Vagrant’s cloud. However they, too, need TLC and updates. So long story…

  • orachk can now warn about unwanted cleanup of files in /var/tmp/.oracle

    Some time ago @martinberx mentioned on twitter that one of his Linux systems suffered from Clusterware issues for which there wasn’t a readily available explanation. It turned out that the problem he faced were unwanted (from an Oracle perspective at least) automatic cleanup operations in /var/tmp/.oracle. You can read more at the original blog post.…