Month: September 2019 | The ORACLE-BASE Blog

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : Groundbreakers Unconference

This year the Groundbreakers Briefing was completely different. Rather than have some formal presentations, the Groundbreaker Ambassadors an a bunch of Oracle staff all took part in an unconference. People suggested topics and we went into groups to discuss the topics that interested us. Obviously there was a lot of overlap in interests/concerns.

The first one I took part in was discussing a number of areas relating to “Is the RDBMS dead?” and this also included platforms and delivery mechanisms, such as containers. There were people from both sides of the camp, meaning those that favour the RDBMS and those that don’t. From my perspective I say use the correct tool for the job. In some cases that is a RDBMS. In some cases not. When we become too partisan, it’s easy to lose perspective. Of course, it’s also hard to be objective if you’ve spent most of your working life in one camp or the other. I think we have a lot to learn from each other, and the “next big thing” will only happen if we keep an open mind.

The next one I went to related to diversity in the workplace, which is something I have an interest in. The person that suggested this session was basically asking the question, “How do I know if I’m part of the problem?” As always with these types of discussions, it was interesting to hear different takes on the subject. I’m not going to talk specifics, as I don’t think it’s my place to report on some of the things that were said, but it seems like awareness is the first step in this process. Rather than move on to the next session, I continued this discussion with some of the folks. The great thing about an unconference is the rules are, there are no rules (sort-of). 🙂

From there we went off to the San Francisco Science Museum for a couple of hours. I’m a town/city person, but I like looking at nature. We spent some time looking at fish, butterflies, snakes and frogs etc. Pretty cool. Let’s hope this isn’t the only way to see these in future!

From there we had to shoot across to the Oracle ACE dinner. Chatting with people is what I really enjoy at conferences, so being able to meet up with everyone and have a chin-wag is great. Not surprisingly I had far too much food! 🙂

It was a long and busy day, and the conference hadn’t even started yet!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. There is an event during the evenings called the Groundbreakers Unconference, which is open to all the people at the conference. That’s not what I’m talking about here. 🙂

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : ACE Director Briefing (including APEX 19.2 EA)

The ACE Director Briefing is under NDA, so I can’t talk about it. Most of the stuff mentioned will be known to the general public by the end of OpenWorld, so I’m not going to say anything here, as I don’t need the grief of saying something I shouldn’t. 🙂

The announcements are nice, and I think some people will be pleasantly surprised, but if I’m honest, the main thing for me is meeting everyone, including the wife and kids, who I’ve not seen for ages. There are a lot of people I only get to meet at these briefings each year…

A thing that is definitely OK for us to talk about is APEX 19.2 EA, available at the following URL.

https://www.tryapexnow.com

A number of features were discussed and demonstrated by Mike Hichwa and Joel Kallman, including a very impressive demo of the “Faceted Search” feature in APEX 19.2, which is just a few clicks away…

Navigate to “SQL Workshop”.
Use the “Object Browser”.
Click on table of interest.
Under the default “Table” tab, Click the “Create App” button.
On the subsequent screen, click the “Create App” button.
Accept the default app by clicking the “Create Application” button.
Click the “Run Application” button.
Click on the “{Table Name} Search” page.
Boom! You have Faceted Search.

And what you get out of the box looks like this…

Awesome! There is of course a Faceted Search page type for adding one to an existing application. APEX is a crazy good development tool these days!

After the briefing was done I went across to my Dad’s place to have a belated Birthday party. It was great to hook up again. Good food. Good company. It was a really nice end to the evening. Thanks Dad! I know he’s got a discoverer pass for OOW, so maybe we’ll get to see him around???

Cheers

Tim…

PS. As always, sleep continues to elude me, so I looks and feel like the walking dead! 🙂

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : The Journey Begins

The day began at 03:00, or more accurately it began the previous morning, as I didn’t sleep overnight. Normal nervous can’t sleep stuff.

I got a taxi to the airport, which was easy at that time. The first flight from Birmingham to Amsterdam was a little late to get going, but we played catch-up in the air. I got to Amsterdam, and the next boarding gate was close, so no drama there. At the boarding gate I met Frits Hoogland and Sai Penumuru, so we had a chat before the next flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco.

I got really lucky because I was in an aisle seat, and the middle seat was free. It felt like poverty business class. 🙂 The flight was long and boring, as you would expect, but I did get to watch the following.

Avengers: Endgame – It was a pretty good ride. I’m not sure it was deserving of all the hype, but it was good. There were a few scenes I loved. Seeing Valkarie on a flying horse was awesome. There was one scene where the most boring avenger did something I really liked.
Glass – I liked this, but if I’m honest I was expecting more, considering I loved both Unbreakable and Split.
Alita: Battle Angel – I’ve seen this several times, but I love it.

We landed in San Francisco on time, but there was a long wait at customs. We eventually got through and took the BART to the city centre. From there it was a quick walk to the hotel. I checked in and went to bed to get a little sleep. A bit later I got up to go to the Oracle Groundbreakers dinner, then it was an early night, trying to play catch-up on lost sleep.

Today is the Oracle ACE Directors briefing…

Cheers

Tim…

Update 1: I was just told off for not mentioning “the wife”, even though I didn’t see her yesterday. To get me out of the dog-house, this morning I saw Debra Lilley…

Update 2: I was just told off for not mentioning “the daughter” and “the son”. At the Groundbreakers Dinner I got to meet with with my “problem child” daughter Heli, and my low maintenance son Gerald, who doesn’t tell me off if I don’t mention him… 🙂

Vagrant Build of AWX on Oracle Linux 7 Using Docker-Compose Method

I may need to do a bunch of scripting related to our load balancers, and I have the choice of using the API from the servers directly, Ansible Core or the web services exposed by AWX. I wanted to play around with AWX anyway, so that seemed like a good excuse…

First step was to install AWX. It’s pretty easy, but I must admit to spending a few minutes in a state of confusion until I rebooted my brain and started again. Turning things off and on always works. I’m an Oracle Linux person and “I do Docker”, so the obvious choice was to install it using the Docker-Compose method on Oracle Linux 7 (OL7).

AWX Installation on Oracle Linux 7 (OL7) Using the Docker-Compose Method

The post includes the basic Docker setup, but if you need something a little more, check out the installation article and video.

If you don’t care about the build and just need AWX up quickly, you can use this Vagrant build that does everything for you, including Docker and AWX on Oracle Linux. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld and Code One 2019

It’s nearly time for the madness to start again. This will be my 14th trip to San Francisco for OpenWorld, and however many it is since Java One and Code One got wrapped up into this…

Flights booked : ✔
Hotel booked : ✔
ESTA approved : ✔
Irrational fear of flying and general anxiety : ✔
80 lbs weight loss : ❌
Talk complete : ❌
Denial : ✔

At the moment the scheduled stuff looks like this.

Friday :

03:00 UK time : Start the trip over to SF. I know I said I would never do this again, and I know what the consequences will be…
Evening SF time : Groundbreaker Ambassador Dinner

Saturday : Day : ACE Director Briefing

Sunday :

Day : Groundbreaker Ambassador Briefing
Evening : Oracle ACE Dinner

Tuesday :

Session ID: DEV1314
The Seven Deadly Sins of SQL
Date: 17th Sept 2019
Time: 11:30 – 12:15

Wednesday :

Session ID: DEV6013
Embracing Constant Technical Innovation in Our Daily Life
Date: 18th Sept 2019
Time: 16:00 – 16:45
Panel: Gustavo Gonzalez, Sven Bernhardt, Debra Lilley, Francisco Munoz Alvarez, Me

Thursday : Fly home.

Friday : Arrive home, have a post-conference breakdown and promise myself I’ll never do it again…

In addition to those I have to schedule in the following:

A shift on the Groundbreakers Hub, but I’m not sure what day or what demo yet. I’ll probably hang around there a lot anyway.
Meet a photographer to get some photos done. I’ve told them they’ve got to be tasteful and “only above the waist”.
Spend some time annoying everyone on the demo grounds. I know Kris and Jeff are desperate to see me. It’s the highlight of their year!
Stalk Wim Coekaerts, whilst maintaining an air of ambivalence, so as not to give the game away. Can anyone else hear Bette Midler singing “Wind Beneath My Wings”? No? Just me?

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff too, but I’ve not got through all my emails yet. Just looking at this is giving me the fear. So much for my year off conferences…

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

Docker Birmingham – September

Yesterday evening I went to my first Docker Birmingham meetup, sponsored by Black Cat Technology Solutions.

I was so tired before the event I was really nervous I would fall asleep half way through a presentation and start snoring. 🙂 When I got there I was greeted by an array of pizzas. I wanted to eat them so badly, but then I would definitely sleep, so I resisted. 🙂 I spent a bit of time chatting to one of the hosts Shaun McLernon before the sessions started.

The agenda had a last minute change, as one of the speakers was ill, so the first presentation was a lighthearted one by Alistair Hey called “CV Driven Development – Why it’s ok not to be ‘cool’. ” He spoke about the things that trigger alarm bells when he’s looking at CVs, and used that as a segway into comparing what’s cool, with what just works. A specific case being a comparison between Kubernetes and AWS ECS, where he compared the pros and cons of each. The take home message was use the correct tool for the job, where the “correct tool” choice will be influenced by your requirements, skills and what works for your organisation.

Being short of a speaker, a couple of folks stepped up to talk about their projects in a lightning talk style. First up was Marcus Oaten with a talk about an environment built on Docker for testing new architectures for a Drupal application. Essentially using Docker to model all the services and layers to try new approaches out before having to commit to a specific architectural change.

Next up was Dan Webb speaking about the evolution of the builds used for a PHP environment he was working on. Moving from large-ish multi-purpose containers to smaller single-purpose containers with separation of duties and multi-stage builds.

I think the lightning talks worked really well. They triggered a lot of discussion, with people throwing out ideas.

The meetup was really useful. I like the “this is what we are doing” stuff, as it feels a lot more real, and shows the thought process and progression. I’m not sure about the experience level of the other folks, but I’m a Docker newbie, so this sort of thing is more important to me than hearing all about the super-cool stuff I will probably never use. I like hearing that as well, but this this stuff is more relevant to me at this stage.

I definitely plan to go again. Thanks to the folks at Black Cat Technology Solutions for sponsoring and organising the event, and to the speakers for stepping up to the plate.

Cheers

Tim…

Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group – Launch

Last night I went to the launch of a new meetup called Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group. It was co-organised by Urfaan Azhar and Lee Thatcher from Pure Technology Group, and Adrian Newton and Mark Smith from my company.

Some of you may have noticed this isn’t about Oracle. Yes we have a big Oracle Cloud Apps thing and a bunch of Oracle on-prem stuff, but we also have a lot of Microsoft stuff here, including loads of mailboxes on Office 365 etc. As a result, Azure is also becoming a big thing for us.

I’ve used Azure a bit for some Oracle trials, with the articles on the site, and I did a WebLogic on Azure talk some years back, but this is pretty far out of my lane, so I was really there to show some support to our folks and trying to learn some stuff. 🙂

The turnout was really good. I think there were about 40 people in total, with about 6 coming from our company. For the first event I was kind-of expecting more of “us”, and less of “not us”, so the fact so many “not us” turned up was awesome! Getting a couple of Microsoft Most Valuable Professisonal (MVP) speakers for the launch event was cool.

After some introductions from Urfan and Lee, the first speaker was Ed Baker with an “Introduction to Microsoft 365”. The purpose of this session was for Ed to give an overview of the M365 stack and try to gauge what we were interested in, to see how the meetup should move forward in future. Ed is an Enterprise Mobility MVP and is clearly comfortable in front of an audience.

After food (Pizza and Indian) and drinks it was time for Gareth Jones with “An Introduction to Microsoft Azure”. Gareth talked about the way Microsoft deliver the Azure services, including the setup of their data centres. Once again, this was about gauging the interest for the different aspects of Azure. Gareth is an Azure MVP, and just like Ed was very happy in front of a crowd.

It was a really good start for the new meetup. Big thanks to Urfaan, Lee, Adrian and Mark for getting this going. Thanks to Ed and Gareth for taking the time to come and speak to us. Thanks to everyone who turned up to support the event, as well as the sponsor Pure Technology Group. I look forward to the next event, to see how this moves forward!

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Docker : Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) Build

In today’s video we’ll take a look at a simple Docker build for Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS). In this example we’re using Tomcat on Oracle Linux 8 (oraclelinux:8-slim), which is connecting to an Oracle 19c database.

This video is based on the following articles and links.

The star of today’s video is Colm Divilly, of ORDS fame. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…