Month: January 2017

How to get started with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2) today?

If you follow my website or the blog, you will know I’ve been putting out some articles about Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2) recently. They are often followed by a question asking when it will be available for download. The answer is…

I DON’T KNOW!

Even though we don’t currently have a downloadable version of 12cR2, that doesn’t stop you learning it. You can start today! There are two easy ways.

  1. Get a free trial on Oracle Database Cloud Service. Click the “Try It” button and fill out the details using a corporate email address. I don’t think it likes your typical free email addresses (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo), but maybe that has changed recently. Since my 1 year free trial ended I’ve used a couple of 30 day free trials. It’s a bit of a pain to lose it after 30 days, but I keep all my stuff scripted, so it’s easy for me to rebuild stuff. You can test a lot of stuff using this if you are creative.
  2. Try out livesql.oracle.com. It’s free and it’s running on 12.2 now. You can only do basic development type stuff, but it means you can start trying SQL and PL/SQL new features today.

It would be really nice if apex.oracle.com, which is still on 12.1.0.2, got upgraded. 🙂

Don’t let the lack of a downloadable version of 12cR2 stop you learning this stuff. There is a load of stuff you can try out just using these two services.

Even if you don’t want to start playing yet, you should probably check out the New Features Manual. It’s always good to know what is coming as it might make you approach existing work slightly differently.

Cheers

Tim…

APEX 5.1 in Production

Just before Christmas I wrote a post about upgrading our development and test APEX installations to the new 5.1 release. We’ve now got it in all our production environments too. 🙂

As far as I’m aware we only had a single issue, which was not directly related to APEX and was actually my fault. I forgot to add the APEX_050100 user to an ACL, so some non-APEX code that was doing web service callouts using the APEX_WEB_SERVICE package stopped working. Once that was added to the ACL all was good.

As always I must stress our company is not a massive user of APEX and most of our applications are fairly vanilla APEX against 11.2.0.4 and 12.1.0.2 databases, so I’m not suggesting your experience will be the same as ours. That said, the move from APEX 5.0.4 to APEX 5.1 was really painless for us.

Cheers

Tim…

Multitenant Enhancements in Oracle Database 12.2

I’ve started playing with some of the new multitenant functionality in Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2). There’s a lot of really cool stuff in there, which makes the multitenant architecture even more interesting. You can get a free trial of the Oracle Database Cloud Service and check it out if you like. 🙂

Here’s what I’ve been doing over the holidays.

There’s a lot more to cover yet though. I think it could be another 22 articles just on the multitenant stuff. This is just the beginning. 🙂

As always with the new stuff, it’s getting revised constantly as I learn more. I’m also having to go back and edit some stuff from 12.1, just to make reference to the changes in 12.2.

I’m maintaining a list of all my multitenant articles here.

Cheers

Tim…

Happy New Year 2017!

So here we are. Another year done and a new one beginning.

I failed abysmally at most of last year’s plans (see here), so I’m not going to make any for this year.

I hope things work out for you all this next year. There will obviously be ups and downs, but let’s hope at the end of the year everything lands on the up side.

Happy New Year!

Cheers

Tim…