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  • Learning Kubernetes: persistent storage with Minikube

    As part of my talk at (the absolutely amazing) Riga Dev Days 2019 I deployed Oracle Restful Data Services (ORDS) in Minikube as my application’s endpoint. I’ll blog about deploying ORDS 19 in docker and running it on Kubernetes later, but before I can do so I want to briefly touch about persistent storage in…

  • Using the Secure External Password store with sqlcl

    Sometimes it is necessary to invoke a SQL script in bash or otherwise in an unattended way. SQLcl has become my tool of choice because it’s really lightweight and can do a lot. If you haven’t worked with it yet, you really should give it a go. So how does one go about invoking SQL…

  • Oracle Instant Client RPM installation where to find things

    Last week I blogged about the option to install Oracle’s Instant Client via the public YUM repository. If you go ahead and try this, there is one thing you will undoubtedly notice: file locations are rather unusual if you have worked with Oracle for a while. This is true at least for the 19c Instant…

  • Installing the Oracle Instant Client RPM via YUM on Oracle Linux 7

    Many applications require Oracle’s instant client to enable connectivity with the database. In the past, getting hold of the instant client required you to agree to the license agreement before you could download the software. For a little while now, Oracle offers a YUM repository with the instant client RPMs. There are a couple of…

  • Learning about Kubernetes: JDBC database connectivity to an Oracle database

    In the past few months I have spent some time trying to better understand Kubernetes and how application developers can make use of it in the context of the Oracle database. In this post I’m sharing what I learned along that way. Please be careful: this is very much a moving target, and I wouldn’t…

  • Ansible tips’n’tricks: provision multiple machines in parallel with Vagrant and Ansible

    Vagrant is a great tool that I’m regularly using for building playground environments on my laptop. I recently came across a slight inconvenience with Vagrant’s Virtualbox provider: occasionally I would like to spin up a Data Guard environment and provision both VMs in parallel to save time. Sadly you can’t bring up multiple machines in…

  • Ansible tips’n’tricks: testing and debugging Ansible scripts using Vagrant

    At last year’s UKOUG I presented about Vagrant and how to use this great piece of software to test and debug Ansible scripts easily. Back then in December I promised a write-up, but for various reasons only now got around to finishing it. Vagrant’s Ansible Provisioner Vagrant offers two different Ansible provisioners: “ansible” and “ansible_local”.…

  • Using dbca to create a physical standby database

    While investigating new options I discovered with dbca for the previous article I noticed that it’s now possible to use Oracle’s Database Creation Assistant (dbca) to create a physical standby database using the -createDuplicateDB flag. I wanted to know how easily this can be done on my Oracle 18.5.0 system. I have 2 VMs, server3…

  • dbca now makes it easy to configure OMF on file systems

    Up until – and including – Oracle 12.1 I always found it not-quite-so-straight-forward to create a new database using Database Creation Assistant (dbca) and configure it with Oracle Managed Files (OMF) on a file system in silent mode. I really like to use OMF in my lab databases as it saves me a lot of typing. I…

  • Ansible tips’n’tricks: understanding your Ansible configuration

    When writing automation scripts I tend to use a local Ansible configuration file. This has certain advantages for me, such as including it in a version control system (VCS). It also is a valid option for developers without access to the global configuration file installed by the package manager. And more convenient to use than…