Video : Ansible Playbooks : Handlers

In today’s video we demonstrate how to use handlers in Ansible Playbooks.

The video is based on the following article.

You might find some useful stuff here.

The star of today’s video is my dad, Graham Wood, who spend most of his time galivanting and spending my inheritance, which I’ve been waiting patiently for!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 22.1 : All Change!

You may have heard version 22.1 of Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) has been released. For the versions between 3.0 and 21.4 the installation process was pretty much the same. From version 22.1 it’s out with the old and in with the new…

I’ve put out an installation article, but remember it’s early days for me, so I will probably be revisiting this over the coming weeks as I learn more.

The Big News

  • We no longer run commands using “ords.war” directly. Instead we use an “ords” script/executable in the “bin” subdirectory. That kind-of makes every installation or configuration article you’ve ever read wrong.
  • The above change means standalone mode is also different, so even starting and stopping ORDS has changed.
  • The configuration location is no longer written into the “ords.war” file, so you have to make sure standalone, Tomcat, WebLogic knows where to find the config.
  • The contents/structure of the configuration has changed, so once again anything you’ve read about configuration has probably changed.

It all sounds quite dramatic, and it certainly confused the hell out of me, but I think a couple of weeks down the line I will forget it was ever any other way. 🙂

I’ve updated one of my Vagrant builds to use the new version. I’ll do the others over time…

Over the next few days/weeks I’ve got to visit all my ORDS content (over 30 articles) to check how these changes have impacted it. Off the top of my head I think I’ve got about 3 rewrites to do, and some corrections of other articles.

Don’t Panic

From a usage perspective, ORDS looks the same, so there is no need to panic. It’s just one of those administration evolutions you expect in the lifetime of a product.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’ve been making Jeff Smith‘s life miserable regarding the documentation. Thanks for the feedback and changes Jeff. 😉

VirtualBox 6.1.34

VirtualBox 6.1.34 has been released.

The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

I’ve installed it on Windows 11 and macOS Big Sur hosts with no dramas. Some time in the next 24 hours I’ll upload updated versions of my Oracle Linux 7 and Oracle Linux 8 vagrant boxes.

This is going to get plenty of testing as I run all my Vagrant builds using the latest Oracle patches.

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Ansible Playbooks : Host and Group Variables

In today’s video we demonstrate how to use lists and loops in Ansible Playbooks.

The video is based on the following article.

You might find some useful stuff here.

The star of today’s video is Toon Koppelaars, famous for The Helsinki Declaration (IT Version), which you may know better these days as the SmartDB approach to building applications.

Cheers

Tim…

Operating Systems for Oracle Databases, Including Windows This Time… (Poll Results Discussed)

Last week I put out a post about operating systems used for running Oracle databases.

Operating Systems for Oracle Databases (Poll Results Discussed)

This was the first question from the previous post.

Which operating system are you using for your Oracle database servers?

Unfortunately I forgot to include Windows. A number of people contacted me about this, asking if I would ask the question again and include Windows this time, so I did. Also, this time I was explicit about production systems, because I suspect some people were answering about their home setup… 🙂

So here we go for the second time…

Which operating system are you using for the majority of your **production** Oracle Databases servers? Not demo kit on your PC at home. A repeat of last week, but remembering to include Windows this time…

We can see Linux is still the clear winner, with UNIX and Windows battling it out for the second place spot. Going back to my statement from the last post, there is no point in purposely making yourself a minority, which would clearly suggest Linux is the place to be. Windows is a slight exception to that, because if your company has no experience on Linux, but a good grounding in Windows administration, it might be a good idea for you to stick with Windows, rather than doing a bad job with Linux. I can’t imagine there are many places with good UNIX skills and no Linux skills, so I’m not going to give the same “get out of jail free card” for that. 🙂

So as I said before, Linux is dominating, so you can see why there is so few posts about Oracle on other platforms these days…

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Ansible Playbooks : Lists and Loops

In today’s video we demonstrate how to use lists and loops in Ansible Playbooks.

The video is based on the following article.

You might find some useful stuff here.

The star of today’s video is Øyvind Isene, who took a break during coffee time to let me film this clip.

Cheers

Tim…

Operating Systems for Oracle Databases (Poll Results Discussed)

I put out some questions on Twitter a couple of days ago, asking about the operating systems people were using for their Oracle database servers.

As with all these polls, we have to discuss some caveats. Most of the people that follow me are from the Oracle community, so that puts a heavy bias on the outcome. The questions relate to Oracle databases, which also influences the results. Someone may choose one distribution to run Oracle workloads, and a different distribution to run non-Oracle workloads. We also have to remember the sample size is small. Despite this, I’m going to discuss the results as if this were a representative sample of people, even though I accept it may not be. 🙂

This was the first question I asked.

Which operating system are you using for your Oracle Databases servers?

You’ll notice I totally forgot to include Windows, which was a shame because it would have been nice to see that. My main focus was to see how many people were still holding on to the traditional UNIX systems. There was a really strong showing for Linux over UNIX, which was hardly surprising. Every year the dominance of Linux is increasing. A few years back a lot of big companies were still using the traditional UNIX systems, but I guess a lot of people have got sick of spending that sort of cash, and some have probably switched to buying Exadata kit instead. I cant say I’m surprised by this result.

Something I’ve said repeatedly over the years is you should stick to the operating system that is the most popular, as that is the one that is going to get tested the most. There is no point in purposely making yourself a minority IMHO. Having lived through the death of Oracle on Tru64 and HP-UX, I wouldn’t dream of using anything other than Linux now.

This was the next question.

For Linux users, which Linux distro are you using for your Oracle database servers?

Over 65% of the folks picked Oracle Linux, and about 27% picked RHEL. The fact this is a poll about Oracle database servers no doubt added to the skew in this result. Oracle have done a good job of promoting Oracle Linux, and the fact it is free probably helps a lot. I thought Oracle Linux would be the winner here, but I’m not sure I expected it to be by this much. Personally I wouldn’t run on anything other than Oracle Linux by choice. Remember, this is what Exadata uses, and this is what Oracle Cloud uses.

I suspect some of the people that picked “Other” were speaking about non-production systems. Perhaps I should have made it clear I was thinking about production, not test labs…

This was the final question.

For Enterprise Linux users, which version of Oracle Linux and/or RHEL are you using for your Oracle database servers?

It’s good to see that nobody is owning up to OL5/RHEL5. There are still a few things lingering on OL6/RHEL6, but I guess those are probably running old versions of the database.

OL7/RHEL7 is still the most common version, but I guess a lot of this is down to the long lifespan of database servers. I suspect many of these servers were provisioned some time ago. I’m hoping most new deployments are using OL8/RHEL8.

So nothing really that surprising about the outcome of this batch of questions. Pity I didn’t include Windows in the first question. Maybe next time…

Cheers

Tim…

Video : Ansible Playbooks : Introduction

In today’s video we’ll introduce Ansible Playbooks.

There’s quite a lot to cover, so this is only one of several videos covering playbooks. The video is based on the following article.

You might find some useful stuff here.

The star of today’s video is Bailey, who has been known to associate with Connor McDonald at times…

Cheers

Tim…

The Oracle ACE Program : My 16 Year Anniversary

It’s April 1st, which means it’s my 16th year anniversary of being an Oracle ACE.

As usual I’ll mention some of the other anniversaries that will happen throughout this year.

  • 27 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
  • 22 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or current name: 31 August 2001)
  • 17 years blogging in June. (15 June 2005)
  • 16 years on the Oracle ACE Program. (01 April 2006)
  • 7 years doing videos on my YouTube channel, with some breaks of course.
  • A combined 5 years as an Oracle Developer Champion, renamed to Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador. (21 June 2017) This will be the last time I mention this, as the Groundbreaker Ambassador is now being merged back into the ACE program. It was fun while it lasted. 🙂

Fingers crossed for next year…

Cheers

Tim…