Oracle related rants (and lots of off-topic stuff)…
VirtualBox 5.2.10 has been released for some platforms.
The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.
At the time of writing the Windows release hasn’t dropped, so watch this space.
I’ve got it running on Windows, macOS and Oracle Linux 7 hosts with no worries…
Happy upgrading.
Cheers
Tim…
Update: As you will tell from the edits, the Windows flavour is now available too.
Following my normal pattern, sleep was a little fitful the night before a flight. I got up early and walked over to meet Sebastian at his hotel. We were on the same first flight, so we shared a taxi to the airport.
We purposely started early to avoid the traffic, making it a really easy journey in to the airport. We got through check-in and security really quickly, which left us with about three hours before the flight. Neither of us had the correct status for this flight, so we paid to get into the lounge and chill for a few hours. Happy days…
As we were boarding my boarding pass dinged on the machine and I had a free upgrade to business, which was nice. The flight to Dubai took about 3.5 hours and I was able to work for the whole of it, which was great. I answered a few emails and did an upgrade of one of our Dev systems. Travelling would be so much easier if it was always like this… 🙂
After a 2 hour connection I was on a 7.5 hour flight to Birmingham. Unfortunately there was no free upgrade for this flight, so it was back to cattle class… The flight itself was fine, bit I was getting a bit desperate to land by the end of it.
Once I landed in Birmingham it was a quick taxi ride home and Oracle Code : India was done. 🙂
These are the posts I wrote during this trip.
Thanks to all the Oracle Code crew for inviting me and sorting everything out. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program and Oracle Developer Champions Program for letting me continue to fly the flag. Thanks to all the attendees that help make these events really successful, especially all the folks that came to my sessions and spoke to me after the sessions.
I spoke to Sai about coming back to Bengaluru in December for the Sangam 2018 event. Let’s see if that works out… 🙂
I’m not looking forward to working out how much of my own money I spent on this trip… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Today was Oracle Code : Bengaluru.
I spent the last few days working from my hotel room so I was feeling a little stir crazy and was ready to get out and meet people. Then I destroyed my demo… 🙁 After spending some time putting it back together again I headed off to the conference venue, which was across the road from my hotel, so that involved waiting for a gap in the traffic for 10 minutes. 🙂
The event was really busy. I had a slot before lunch and once everyone filed in it was standing room only for my Make the RDBMS Relevant Again with RESTful Web Services and JSON session.
After the session I spent hours chatting to people and posing for photos. I had a lot of questions about ORDS, so I opened my laptop on a counter surface and talked some more, answering questions by working through articles I had written. It was really good fun.
I had a short break, to record a video for the event, then it was back to chatting to folks. As a result, I didn’t get to see anyone else’s presentations, but these events are all about getting us together and enthusing about the technology, so it didn’t matter. Before I knew it the event was over.
I hope everyone had a great day. I know I did. 🙂 Thanks everyone for coming along, being so enthusiastic and coming to speak to me. 🙂 Thanks to the Oracle Code crew for putting on a great event and inviting me to it. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program and the Oracle Developer Champions program for letting me be involved in these events.
After the event I went over to meet with the Oracle Code crew and Developer Champions to get some food. After eating far too much and saying my goodbyes it was back to the hotel to get some sleep before the flight home tomorrow!
Thanks you all and see you all soon!
Cheers
Tim…
If you’re active in the Twitter-verse you will have seen a bunch of tweets yesterday about the release of the 18.1.x versions of Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS), SQL Developer (and Data Modeler) and SQLcl.
The first thing I did was edit my ORDS Docker build to use the latest versions of ORDS, SQLcl, Tomcat9 and Java9. If you are interested in playing with that you can find the build on my GitHub here. It was all smooth sailing! 🙂
There are a couple of things I would like to point out about the ORDS 18.1 documentation.
The way I read it, the documentation suggests there are two ways of installing ORDS in a multitentant environment, both of which involve installing it into the CDB.
Multitenant is an architecture, so it doesn’t imply the presence of the Multitenant option, or multiple PDBs in the CDB. In fact, I would suggest the vast majority of CDBs will only ever contain a single PDB, as most instances will eventually switch to Lone-PDB (for free) now that non-CDB is deprecated. So what does this have to do with the installations described above?
The advantage of installing ORDS in the CDB is you can have a single connection pool for all PDBs in the instance, which is a big advantage if you have 4096 PDBs in your CDB. If you only have one PDB per CDB, there is no advantage, and actually there is a disadvantage because the PDB has yet another dependency on the CDB, which means ORDS must be installed in the other CDBs before you clone/relocate a PDB to them.
In my opinion, the best way to install ORDS for Lone-PDB, and possibly even for small numbers of PDBs in one instance, is to install directly into the PDB, just like we do with APEX. This means each PDB needs its own connection pool in ORDS, but that’s not a problem. This way the PDB doesn’t have an external ORDS dependency on the container and can be moved between containers without any fuss.
You will see my ORDS installation article installs directly into the PDB, although I will be amending it with some comments about other options.
One of the new features of ORDS 18.1 is you can now use database authentication to provide basic authentication for your calls to PL/SQL. You won’t see that in the documentation though. It’s only present in the examples under the “/path/to/ords/examples/db_auth” directory when you unzip the ORDS media.
Using this type of authentication is not advisable, it’s much better to use OAuth2, but for people like me that have a lot of applications and XML web services still using mod_plsql, this is a really handy feature, and certainly eases the transition from mod_plsql to ORDS.
It would be nice if this feature were put into the main documentation, as it will be a welcome addition for many people out there. It is a feature, so it should be documented as such, and anything that improves the uptake of ORDS has got to be a good thing.
How’s about including the document upload/download functionality from mod_plsql in ORDS also? That would help with the transition too. Yes, I know it’s easy to code this yourself, but that is still an application change, rather than just switching from one gateway to another. Just sayin’. 🙂
I’ll be playing around with ORDS 18 over the coming weeks. I’ll probably amend some of my existing ORDS articles as a result of that, and no doubt put out a new article on database authentication, for the lost souls that don’t look at the media examples, like me before Jeff told me to. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I mentioned in the previous post I ducked out of the evening dinner as I needed to get some sleep. I had very little up to this point, and having to get up at 03:00 to get a flight suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. 🙂
I got some really nice food from the hotel and went to bed. In typical Tim style I was so nervous about not waking up in time for the plane I didn’t sleep. When 03:00 rolled up I felt quite bad. I went down to the desk to check out and meet Lori and Sebastian, who were on the same flight as me. At that point my stomach started grinding, I started to get the sweats and shiver. I won’t go into the details, but I started to wonder if I would make it to Bengaluru with any dignity intact…
In the taxi I felt quite bad, until I noticed the driver falling asleep and then the adrenalin made me feel super focused. I had a flashback to my taxi ride from hell between Jalandhar and Noida. We made it to the airport in one piece. Once the adrenalin subsided I felt terrible again.
The flight was really short and easy, but I started to feel like I was going to puke once we had landed. I was stopping in a different hotel to the others, but I piggy-backed on their ride, which was a big car with great aircon, which made me feel much better.
By the time we got to their hotel I was feeling quite good. I walked down the road to my hotel and went to bed at 08:30. Once I had some sleep I was feeling good, so I logged in to work to for the afternoon shift (UK time).
I think all this drama was caused by a lack of sleep. Debra can tell you some stories about what happens when I don’t sleep properly (hospital in Jalandhar and Machu Picchu). I’m such a delicate petal. 🙂
I have to “work from home (from India)” for a few days before the Oracle Code : Bengaluru event. See you there!
Cheers
Tim…
PS. On a strange note, my room number in the new hotel is the same as in the previous hotel. Freaky!
Today was Oracle Code : Hyderabad.
I woke up in a bit of a daze, so rather than jumping straight into the fray I worked through my demos again just to settle my nerves. 🙂
I headed down for my session to find there was no lectern and they wanted to run my presentation from the audio desk. I said that wasn’t going to work as I had live demos, so they guys went off to find one. The keynote had overrun, so people were late coming into the session, which bought me some time. 🙂
The presentation was a little tricky. The sound on the wireless head mic kept dropping out or getting feedback, so I switched to a hand mic part way through, which made typing difficult. There was a large back-lit screen, which looked great, but didn’t work with a laser pointer, so that made life harder. Despite the issues, I think the talk went OK. It was a little choppy, but I think I got the message across. The main thing was I got through it without my laptop giving up. 🙂
After my session I spent a lot of time chatting to people and continuing the discussion of Oracle Databases on Docker, which filtered into lunch.
After lunch I did a periscope live stream with Connor McDonald chatting about a variety of things including my website, presenting and Oracle databases on Docker.
After that I went to watch Connor do a session on SQL. You know you are doing something right when they have to add a few extra rows of seats to the room and you still have people standing. 🙂
From there is was back to the developer lounge to look at the demos. One of the guys doing the IoT demos was a machine. He was so enthusiastic and went all day.
The developer lounge is also a good way to connect with more people. Some people are quite intimidated about asking a question in the session, but they will happily come up to you in private and ask. I always like this bit of the conference.
And before I knew it the day was over. Some of the folks went out to eat together, but I ducked out because I had been so short on sleep already. I decided to go back to my room and crash, but more on that in the next post… 🙂
Overall I think the event went really well. The turnout was great and people were really enthusiastic and open. Thanks everyone, especially those folks that came to speak to me during the day. It makes the events even more fun for me.
So tomorrow I travel to Bengaluru, where I will be “working from home (from India)” for a few days before the next event. I’ve got to save my holidays for events later in the year. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
If you’ve been following my tweets recently you will know I’ve had a bit of a nightmare lead up to these events. Problems with my laptop and problems with my seat on one of the planes.
About 15 minutes before the taxi was due to pick me up I finally got most of the laptop things sorted. It was a bad morning…
I got to the airport in plenty of time and went to the check-in desk to try and get an aisle seat. The lady there said she could lock an aisle seat for me, but couldn’t give me a boarding pass for it as I had ordered veggie food, and moving me to a different to a different floor in the plane was a problem. When I got on the plane there was a bit of confusion, but eventually they told me to sit in the new seat location and see if anyone else turned up to claim it. They didn’t so I got the aisle seat, which was a big relief.
The flight went well, and the guy sitting next to me was cool so I spent a lot of time chatting. Unfortunately I didn’t get any food, but faced with the choice between a window seat with food or an aisle seat with no food, the aisle seat wins every time. I also watched Star Wars : The Last Jedi, which I enjoyed.
I got to Dubai on time and about 14 hours after waking up I finally got to eat something. A Starbucks muffin. 🙂
The flight from Dubai to Hyderabad was only about 3 hours, but by the time it was over I had been awake for about 20 hours and was feeling it. I got to watch Get Out, which was very cool.
I got a Taxi from Hyderabad Airport to the hotel, which was interesting… The driver wasn’t too interested in reading the hotel name or address, which I had written down. He eventually dropped me off at the wrong hotel and they had to explain to him it wasn’t the correct place. He then managed to reverse out of the hotel carpark into oncoming traffic and hit someone. The bumper of our taxi was then pushed back into place before we drove off and finally got to the correct hotel. 🙂
I was about 3 hours early for check-in, but they had a room for me, so it was time for a shower and bed. Sleep was a bit fitful, but at least I got some.
In the evening I met up with some of the other speakers and folks from the Dev Champion Program to get some food, then it was back to bed.
So I made it to Hyderabad. The Oracle Code : Hyderabad event starts tomorrow.
Cheers
Tim…
This year’s anniversary is a little odd because from a career perspective I have now been an Oracle ACE for longer than I’ve not been one. On 1st April 2006 I got an email telling me I was in the program. This year’s anniversaries will look like this.
The Developer Champion is a little different as it’s a one year thing, so there probably won’t be a two year anniversary.
This last year has been a tough one. Let’s see if I can make it to the next anniversary.
Cheers
Tim…