Month: October 2016 | The ORACLE-BASE Blog

VirtualBox 5.1.8

VirtualBox 5.1.8 has burst through the chest of it’s host organism.

Downloads and changelog are in the usual places. It’s a maintenance release, so there are a bunch of bug fixes in there.

I’ve installed it on macOS (Sierra), Windows 7 and Oracle Linux 6 with no problems.SO far no dramas. 🙂

Happy upgrading!

Cheers

Tim…

Bulgarian Oracle User Group (BGOUG) Autumn 2016 Conference

bgoug It’s been over two years, but I’m finally going back to my second home. I’m presenting at BGOUG Autumn 2016 Conference. 🙂

I get back from the OTN APAC Tour, go to work for three days, then I’m off to Bulgaria. I figure if I confuse my body enough it won’t recognise how many time zones I’ve travelled through…

bgoug16-flights

At the moment it looks like this is the last event I’m presenting at in 2016, so let’s make it a good one. Hope to see you all there!

Cheers

Tim…

angry-1300616_640 I read Debra’s post this morning and the fact she had to write it was pretty disappointing. I realise there will always be haters out there who find fault with what people in the community do, but even so…

I’ve written about this in the past (here and here). As Debra pointed out, I’ve got a YouTube series called My Glamorous Life, which illustrates just how boring life on the road is most of the time.

I think it’s safe to say people who have never experienced this type of travel will say something like, “Boo-bloody-hoo! You get to see the world for free and all you can do is moan!” Those that have experienced it will realise how far from glamorous it is.

If you get the opportunity to travel with work or a community program you definitely should. It is a great experience. Just don’t expect it to feel like a holiday. I have the privilege of still being in contact with Tom Kyte and when we discussed his plans for the future, one of the things he mentioned was to travel and actually see the places he’s already been to. That kind-of says it all. 🙂

After every tour I promise myself it will be the last. One day it will be, but for now…

Cheers

Tim…

OTN APAC Tour 2016 : It’s Nearly Here!

otnapac16d In a little over a week I’ll be starting the OTN Asia Pacific (APAC) Tour 2016, or to be more accurate I’ll be starting the first half of it.

I’ll be attending the following events.

Wellington, New Zealand: October 26th (Event)
Auckland, New Zealand: October 27th (Event)
Sydney, Australia: October 31st (Event)
Gold Coast, Australia: November 2nd (Event)

The tour carries on without me (I had already committed to another event in Europe) to the following locations.

Beijing, China: November 4th and 5th (Event)
Shanghai, China: November 6th (Event)
Bangalore, India: November 11 and 12 (Event)

I’m feeling pretty nervous about the travelling. The Dubai to Auckland flight alone is 16+ hours. It’s a long way to go for such a short visit, but I’m sure I will enjoy it when I’m there.

apac16-flights

I did try to upgrade the flights to business class, but there were no seats left. I’ll keep trying. It will cost me a lot of money, but it will make the whole traveling process a lot more pleasant if I can sort it out.

Hopefully I’ll get to see you there. I’ll be the guy asleep on the floor with his tongue hanging out… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Appreciation Day : Summary

Yesterday was the OTN Appreciation Day. The plan was to mobilise the Oracle community to say #ThanksOTN for everything Oracle Technology Network (OTN) have done for the Oracle community over the years. You can obviously search on Twitter for #ThanksOTN, but I’ve compiled a list of blog posts here, so contact me if you’re missing! They are ordered chronologically, or at least in the order I found them. There are some posts with similar, or the same, name. Multiple people can have the same favourite feature. 🙂

OTN Appreciation Day +1. 🙂

Check out pieter v. puymbroeck, who wrote a script (here) to scrape the results from Twitter. Ruben Rodriguez did a similar thing using MCS and JET. I did it the long and painful way because I’m an old-timer. 🙂

Thanks to everyone that wrote a blog post. It was good to see some new, nearly new and returning faces, as well as the usual suspects. I was glad to see some of our Latin American community blogging in Spanish. What’s really cool is the diversity of stuff people posted. Some people took it in a completely different direction, which made it more interesting. Thanks to all those people that tweeted messages of support and retweeted content throughout the day. We got people joining in because they saw the buzz you helped create! And of course, #ThanksOTN. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Some latecomers added. 🙂

OTN Appreciation Day : Data Pump (expdp, impdp)

pump Here’s my contribution to the OTN Appreciation Day.

Data Pump (expdp, impdp) was added in Oracle 10g as a replacement for the rather tired exp/imp utilities, which although useful, were severely lacking in functionality. So why do I like Data Pump? Here are a few standouts for me, but I’m sure other people will prefer others. 🙂

Transportable Tablespaces, and from 12c onward Transportable Database, make moving large amounts of data, or even whole databases easy. This can include platform/endian changes and version upgrade too. This was possible with exp/imp too, but it doesn’t stop it being a useful feature of Data Pump. 🙂
The INCLUDE, EXCLUDE, CONTENT and QUERY parameters allow a lot of flexibility about what you include or exclude from your exports and imports.
The FLASHBACK_TIME parameter allows you to do an export of the data based on a point in time, undo permitting, which allows you to make truly consistent exports.
The REMAP parameters allow you to rename tablespaces, datafiles, schemas, tables and even alter the data during operations.
The DBMS_DATAPUMP package provides a PL/SQL API, allowing you to perform Data Pump operations without having to shell out to the OS. That makes automation a lot simpler.
The NETWORK_LINK parameter can be used to perform export and import operations over a database link. This allows you to create a dump file on a remote database, or even import without an intermediate dump file.

I’m sure beginners think Data Pump is just for doing exports and imports of small databases, but it’s got loads of features. If you’ve not kept up with the new releases, you might be surprised just how much it can do!

If you’re interested in reading something more technical about Data Pump, here are some articles from my website.

Cheers

Tim…

Internet of Things (IoT) : I, for one, welcome our small internet-enabled overlords!

cloud-saucer

You know that thing where you buy a new car and suddenly everyone else seems to be driving the same model? That’s how I am with Internet of Things (IoT) these days. Having had my interest peaked at OOW16, I’m suddenly noticing it getting mentioned everywhere, especially related to security. IoT+Security is now in the same position that Cloud+Security was a few years back. You can just hear the cries of “Won’t someone think of the children?”

We’ve spent years trying to encourage people to patch their PCs, servers and applications in an attempt to not be the next big attack vector, then along comes IoT and kind-of forgets all those lessons of the past (see here). This is common for any emerging tech. Let’s get it to work and worry about making it safe later!

The cheapness of IoT devices make them feel throwaway, so it’s a no-brainer to include them in everything. The problem comes when that throwaway tech is put inside something you plan on keeping for a few years, like a fridge, washing machine or internet-enabled underwear. 🙂 If security hasn’t been considered up front, is it going to end up being a problem long term? Either that, or am I going to have to “flash” my internet-enabled underwear on a regular basis to keep them safe? 🙂

I, for one, welcome our small internet-enabled overlords! But only if they come in peace! It will be interesting to see how thing goes…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Cloud image taken at my nephew’s football match yesterday. Saucer from PixaBay. Bluring by SnagIt. Two minutes and I now have better “evidence” than most UFO videos on YouTube. Let’s see how long it takes for this to end up on one of them. 🙂

macOS Sierra (OS X 10.12)

In the 80s and 90s the Sierra was an incredibly popular, but boring saloon car from Ford. Today I upgraded to macOS Sierra, which will eventually be an incredibly popular (for Mac owners), but boring operating system from Apple.

So what’s new? You get Siri! Oh yes, you also get Siri! There is also Siri! And finally, for good measure you get Siri!

If you own multiple devices, there is some fluff, like shared clipboard, but I don’t own multiple Apple devices, so basically this OS is what I had before with a sprinkling of Siri.

What was the experience of upgrading like? An absolute nightmare! It said it was going to take about 18 minutes, but it seemed to hang for a couple of hours. I ended up doing about 5 hard reboots before it actually came up. After all that hassle and wasted time, I got El Crapitan + Siri. Amazing. Way to innovate Apple!

Of course, Apple fanboys will love it and it will change their lives… Whatever!

Cheers

Tim…