Month: September 2023

Oracle Database 23c Generally Available – Sort Of

Oracle Cloud World is happening, which typically means lots of announcements. One of the welcome announcement was the release of Oracle 23c on OCI Oracle Base Database Service, so there is a production version generally available… Sort of… Why do I say “sort of”?

OCI Oracle Base Database Service

This is a single cloud service, and it’s not available on the free tier, so it’s only available for paying customers that want to use this particular service.

At the time of writing there is no Autonomous Database service for this version, and there is still no full on-prem release.

I thought it was unavailable in my data centre, but Jeff Smith told me 23c GA is only available for Intel shapes at the moment. Once I switched from the default AMD shape to an Intel shape and 23c release was in the database version list. Happy days.

Oracle Database 23c Free

In addition to the OCI Oracle Base Database Service, the announcement post mentions a new version of Oracle Database 23c Free. It is now a “Developer Release”, not a “Developer Preview”. You can get hold of it here.

The slightly confusing thing is there is no difference in the file name, so my immediate impression was it had not actually been released yet. I downloaded the file and did an installation, and sure enough it was version 23.3. It would have been nice if there was an indication of the update on the page, or a version number in the file name…

For those that previously used Oracle XE, Oracle Database 23c Free is now the natural replacement, so go crazy with it. 🙂

Here’s how you can get started.

  • Install documentation here.
  • My installation article here.
  • My Vagrant build here.
  • VirtualBox appliance from Oracle here.
  • Docker image from Oracle here.

Documentation

The documentation links we’ve been using for 23c Free are no longer marked as “Free”. It is the normal GA documentation now.

My 23c Articles

You can see all my 23c articles here. There are still some I can’t publish until the on-prem GA release happens…

On-Prem Release

As mentioned previously, there is no full on-prem release for Oracle 23c, so you can’t start planning your upgrades from 19c yet. It’s really good to have an updated version of Oracle Database 23c Free so quickly for home use, but from a work perspective 23c won’t really exist for me until there is an on-prem release.

I’m hoping that won’t be long, but time will tell.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Someone pointed me to Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1), which has now been updated to include 23c. It says the on-prem releases for 23c will start appearing during 1H CY2024, which is the first half of 2024.

Oracle databases on other clouds?

Oracle just announced the expansion of their partnership with Microsoft to deliver Oracle database services in Azure. You can read the blog post here.

Oracle and Microsoft expand partnership to deliver Oracle database services in Azure

This is a very interesting development for a number of reasons. Here are some of my thoughts…

The database is not a driving factor in cloud provider selection

Over the years Oracle have been playing the game of making Oracle Cloud look like the most attractive place to run Oracle databases. What I think they had lost sight of is the database is not the driving factor in the choice of which cloud provider to pick. It might not even be part of the decision process. Quite often there are other factors that have much more sway.

This move is a welcome step, but I feel like it should just be the beginning!

Software should run on every cloud

I’m sure some people in Oracle now consider themselves a “cloud company”, but I think most of us still consider Oracle as a software company. Oracle rely on sales/licensing to make their money. As a result, anything that blocks the sale of a product is a problem.

Whatever cloud provider I pick, Oracle should be hoping I choose their software to run on my systems.

Not only are companies multi-cloud, but they already use multiple database engines. If there is any friction to using your product, they can go elsewhere.

A welcome start, but…

I’m really glad Oracle have taken this step. Microsoft are the second largest cloud provider, and anything that simplifies using Oracle databases on Azure is a good thing. IMHO this should be the start of the journey. Oracle should be trying to get similar partnerships with other cloud providers too.

Unless I’m missing something, or it’s not been amended yet, this document looks unchanged to me.

The pricing of Oracle on Azure seems to be unchanged, and we are still limited to AWS and Azure as “Authorized Cloud Environments”.

What would I do?

There are two main things:

  • I would make the pricing consistent across all cloud providers and on-prem.
  • I would increase the number of “Authorized Cloud Providers”.

The stats vary, but a quick Google shows me the following market share information.

  • AWS : 32%
  • Azure : 22%
  • Google : 11%
  • Alibaba : 4%
  • Oracle : 2%

Just adding Google and Alibaba would add another 15% of the cloud market as potential customers.

What do I know?

I’m sure someone will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and maybe they are right. I just think Oracle should be making sure most/all of their software is available to run anywhere people want to run it.

As I said before, I’m really happy about this announcement, but I think it needs to be the first step on a longer journey.

Cheers

Tim…

UNIX/Linux Time Command : Record elapsed time

In a recent post I mentioned using a scratchpad to record everything I do. As part of that process I try to make regular use of the UNIX/Linux “time” command to record elapsed times of long running commands.

It’s really simple to use. All you do is put “time” in front of the command and it will display how long it takes to complete the command. In this example I do a sleep for 10 seconds and use the time command to report the elapsed time. 🙂

$ time sleep 10

real    0m10.002s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.001s
$

Clearly that’s a silly example, but it gives you an idea of how this works.

If you get into the habit of using this with all long running processes, you can get accurate timings for steps. That way, when someone asks you how long something takes you can give them a real answer, rather than making something up and hoping for the best.

Just remember, timings can vary if the load on the system varies between runs. Even so it’s always nicer to have some real data to inform your decisions going forward. Especially when planning for something that will cause disruption in production. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…



Using a scratchpad…

Followers of the blog know I’m a big advocate for writing things down. The main reason I do this is because I want a record of everything I do.

I rarely type a command directly into the command line. I nearly always type it in a scratchpad first. Currently I have 67,250 lines in my work scratchpad and 12,309 lines in my personal scratchpad.

When I say scratchpad, I just mean a text file, which I edit using a text editor. Nothing fancy.

Why do I do this?

Inspiration

Most of my articles and blog posts start life as notes in my personal scratchpad. At work some of my scratchpad notes become more formal documentation, like knowledge base notes and how-to files in Git etc.

I know if I don’t make the notes as I go along, I will forget what I did, and struggle to write the documentation later.

If something makes it as far as being written up, it gets removed from my scratchpads, so what’s in there at the moment are notes that have not made the cut, so to speak. 🙂

One of the reasons I’ve been able to produce content for so many years is there is a constant stream of stuff added to my scratchpads. Of course, some of it is junk, but some of it is not.

If you are struggling with documentation or inspiration, I think taking this approach will really help.

Reflection

One of the things that I find really useful about taking notes is it allows me to look back and reflect on what I did to complete something. For example I might search through my scratchpad to see what happened over the lifetime of a server. I can see all tickets that were raised and what firewall rules and configuration changes were required. When I get a similar request this allows me to estimate the amount of work that needs to be done, and I can see what teams will be involved in the process.

I could search though our ticketing system for much of this information, but I find it a lot easier to keep a record of my actions in a scratchpad, then drill into the tickets if I need more info, which I rarely do.

Rewrites

Much like my articles, if I read back through some notes and they aren’t 100% clear, I often rewrite them. Maybe adding some more text, or a clearer example. This process may result in something graduating into being a separate document, but sometimes it just stays in the scratchpad forever.

Give it a go

If you don’t already do this, give it a go and see how you feel about it. Especially you content creators.

Cheers

Tim…

URGENT : Why you should {almost} never put URGENT in your message

Just a little note about something that rubs me up the wrong way.

I quite often get messages with the word URGENT in the subject or text. I scan through the content, and if it doesn’t seem truly urgent to me, I put it at the bottom of my list of things to do. Why?

You are not the central character in my life

When someone is communicating with me, they are thinking it’s a 1-to-1 interaction. What they forget is that I am working on many different things. As a result, for me it is a 1-to-many relationship.

Just because something is urgent to you, it doesn’t mean it takes priority over the other work I am doing. You don’t know what I’m doing, so you can’t possibly know how your issue sits in my list of priorities. Assuming your needs are more important than the needs of others is really rude.

This is even more annoying when it comes from someone outside of work. If you are not paying me, you have no business sending me an “urgent” request.

Your bad planning is not my emergency

In many cases these “urgent” issues could have been solved well in advance. It’s bad planning that has caused this issue, so I don’t see why it should have a negative impact on my life.

Sometimes there are genuine reasons for something to be classed as an emergency, like P1 incidents, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

There are some people that bounce from one emergency to the next. It soon becomes obvious that these people are just really bad at planning, and as a result are constantly in the weeds, and asking you to help drag them out.

Personal heroics don’t help the company long term

Occasionally you have to dig deep to get through a real emergency, but for the constant stream of self-inflicted emergencies, the only solution is to let things fail so people can see the root cause.

Personal heroics may feel good to you in the short term, but in the long term it is bad for your company and for you. The company needs to know what is failing and do something about it. Relying on a small number of people to pull them out of the weeds is not a long term strategy. Sooner or later this will stop working because the “heroes” will get annoyed and leave, or quiet quit.

What does urgent even mean to you?

I once got a message late on a Friday about an “urgent” issue. I felt sorry for the person in question, so I cancelled my plans, worked on the issue and sent them back the solution. I then got a reply saying, “Great, I’ll have a look at it on Monday”. Needless to say I lost my shit. That clearly was not an urgent issue.

I’m not alone

Over the years I’ve had this conversation many times, and I know I’m not the only person that gets annoyed by messages marked as urgent. I also know I’m not the only person that puts them to the bottom on my to-do list if they are not truly urgent.

Conclusion

As you can see, unnecessarily marking things as urgent is a bad idea, and likely to result in a longer resolution time, so next time you consider adding that little word into your message, just don’t!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Rant over…

Answering some questions about Vagrant

Someone on YouTube asked me some general questions about my experience of Vagrant, so I thought I would write them down as a blog post.

Could you share the story of when and how you first encountered Vagrant, and how did you feel about it at the time?

I was quite late to the party. In 2017 I was at a VMware workshop in Cork, Ireland. I was sitting in the hotel and Frits Hoogland was showing me his Vagrant build for a test Oracle database. Like most things when they are unfamiliar, it seemed a little complex. He gave me access to his Vagrant repository, but I hardly looked at it. It was on my list of things to do, but there is always so much on my to-do list. When Frits talks you should listen, but unfortunately I failed that mission. 🙂

About a year later a colleague at work asked me what Vagrant was, and I struggled to give a reasonable answer. That evening I Googled it, and tried a couple of really simple builds. As someone with lots of VMs at home it totally blew my mind. From that point on I was hooked. I wrote Vagrant builds for all my test databases, so I could rebuild them whenever I wanted to. I went from never using it, to never shutting up about it overnight.

Now my PC is a lot less bloated. I don’t have to keep loads of VMs for different database versions, RAC and Data Guard etc. If I need something to do a test I just build it from scratch.

Another benefit is it makes live demos feel a lot less stressful. I remember being in my hotel in India, and a few minutes before I was due to start presenting I was having some issues with my demo VM. I just typed “vagrant destroy -f” followed by “vagrant up” and my demo system was rebuilt and I was good to go. Nightmare averted, and no need for loads of backups and snapshots.

How long does it usually takes for you to create the builds that are used to create the database?

The first couple of real builds took some time as there was a learning curve with Vagrant. Fortunately I have a lot of Oracle skills and some basic system administration skills, so it wasn’t too bad. It would have been a lot harder if I was trying to pick up several new skills at the same time.

All my Vagrant builds are based on articles, so I already know what to do. I’m basically tweaking the instructions from my articles to form the Vagrant builds.

The more vagrant builds you do, the quicker you get at doing them, because you have a repository of previous builds to pull ideas from. I’m now at the point where most new builds are slight variations of a previous build, so they are really quick to write.

How are you using Vagrant at work? I assume that some companies will require us to install the database with its options in a bare metal server, and not with VMs.

I use Vagrant at home. All my writing is based on VMs I’m running at home. Those VMs are built using Vagrant.

Automation at work is a little tricky because there is a separation of duties between virtualization, system administration and DBA teams. Configuring a complete automation is quite time consuming and political. Terraform and Ansible are more commonly used at work, but we are still on that journey. We are less DevOps and more DevHopeful. 🙂

Our cloud automations all use Terraform. Terraform is similar to Vagrant, as both are produced by Hashicorp.

The tools you use for automation are not as important as the attitude. Once you get into automation you can switch between tools a lot more easily, because you understand the approach you need to take.

How does using Vagrant help you in serving your customers?

Using Vagrant at home makes it quick to set up new environments, which allows me to learn new stuff faster. I don’t like doing anything at work unless I’ve already tried it at home. I guess me knowing more helps me do my job better, which ultimately benefits the people depending on me at work, so I guess there is an indirect relationship. 🙂

How do you learn Vagrant?

If you want to know more about Vagrant you can start here.

I find the easiest way to learn about Vagrant is to build things. There are loads of builds on the internet to use for inspiration. You can find mine here.

Cheers

Tim…