Oracle VirtualBox 7.0.18, Vagrant 2.4.1 and Packer 1.10.3

Oracle VirtualBox 7.0.18

VirtualBox 7.0.18 has been released.

The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

I’ve installed it on my Windows 10 and 11 machines. Both gave me issues, which I put down to the new version of VirtualBox, but on further investigation it was actually because of my new Vagrant box builds.

If I used the new version of VirtualBox with the old version of my Vagrant boxes the builds worked fine. If I tried to use one of the newly built Vagrant box versions it failed with this error.

The SSH connection was unexpectedly closed by the remote end. This
usually indicates that SSH within the guest machine was unable to
properly start up. Please boot the VM in GUI mode to check whether
it is booting properly.

I tried using “config.ssh.keep_alive = true” in the Vagrantfile, but that didn’t help. I’m continuing to investigate the issue, but it seems like VirtualBox 7.0.18 is working fine. It’s something with my box builds which is the problem.

Vagrant 2.4.1

Releases of VirtualBox prompt me to check for new versions of Vagrant. The current version is Vagrant 2.4.1. All my test systems are built with Vagrant, so I installed it as well.

If you are new to Vagrant and want to learn, you might find this useful.

Once you understand that, I found the best way of learning more was to look at builds done by other people. You can see all my Vagrant builds here.

I’ll be doing some updates to my Oracle builds over the coming days, so this will get a lot of testing.

Packer 1.10.3

I use Packer to rebuild my Vagrant boxes (Oracle Linux 7, 8 and 9) so they have the latest guest additions. For the reasons mentioned above I’ve not released the new version of the Vagrant boxes yet. You can see the old ones here.

If you are interested in creating your own Packer builds, you might take inspiration from mine, available here.

Once I get to the bottom of the SSH issues on the new builds I’ll update the boxes.

How did it all go?

Most things worked fine. As mentioned there is an issue with my Vagrant box builds, but I’m assuming that is something on my side of things. 🙂

What about the VirtualBox GUI?

Just a quick warning. I do everything using Vagrant, so I rarely look at the VirtualBox GUI. Remember, when I say everything worked fine, I mean for what I use.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 23ai : How it affects me…

Oracle have released Oracle Database 23ai. You can watch the announcement video here, and read the announcement blog post here.

I don’t think I can add much to that, but I just want to talk about how this affects me as a customer and as a content creator.

Customer View

We’ve been waiting for Oracle Database 23 for a very long time. As I mentioned in this post, most of the upgrades I’ve been asked to do in my career are not driven by new features. They are driven by a need to stay in support.

Database upgrades are pretty simple from a technical perspective, but from a project perspective they are a nightmare. It takes ages to get everyone to agree to them, and then an eternity to actually test things before progressing to production. Any delays have a massive impact on this process.

We are in the process of migrating loads of our databases off Oracle Linux 7 and on to Oracle Linux 8 or 9 depending on 3rd party vendor support. We have to go through a whole testing cycle to complete this. If Oracle 23 had been released last year, many of these migrations would have gone directly to the new OS and new database version. You can argue the virtues of doing things separately or as a big bang, but our reality is testing resources are our biggest blocker, so having to test all our systems twice, once for the OS migration and once for the DB migration, represents a problem.

The delay of Oracle 23 on-prem has been a big headache. When I saw the announcement of Oracle Database 23ai I was sure it would include the on-prem version of the database. It does not. That was a bitter disappointment!

Content Creator View

I realise most of the people reading this are not content creators, and these issues are unlikely to affect you, but here goes…

Over the last 18 months I’ve written a bunch of articles. With the release of 23c Free I was able to publish most of them. As part of the Oracle community hype machine we’ve been encouraged to produce as much content about 23c as possible. There are a lot of us that will either have to go back and edit our 23c content, or leave the internet full of content for a version that doesn’t exist.

For the most part 23ai is just 23c with a different badge, so much of this can be done with a search and replace, along with the appropriate redirects. Where it is a bigger problem is for those that have published videos on YouTube, as those need to be redone and republished. There is no quick in-place edit. I’m one of the lucky ones here, as I made the decision to wait for the on-prem release before starting any videos, but some people will have a really painful job to do if they want things to keep current.

What I’m doing now

I’ve started the process.

My 23c index page now redirects to 23ai. It still contains all the 23c articles, but over the coming weeks they will change. All the old URLs will be redirected, so the world won’t be filled with broken links. It’s just going to take some time. If any of you notice any problems, just give me a shout.

I updated my vagrant builds. The 23c Free on OL8 build is now 23ai Free on OL8 build. There is also an OL9 build. You can find them here.

The original article about this OL8 build has been amended, and there is a new one for OL9.

The first step on the journey…

Overall

So I’m a few steps back compared to where I was before the announcement. I’m still waiting for the on-prem release, and now I’ve got to rework a bunch of existing content…

We are already seeing some backlash against AI in the tech press. I hope the new name doesn’t come back to haunt Oracle.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Of course it’s all my own fault.

When Auditing Attacks

I had a particularly annoying problem with Oracle auditing a few days ago. I thought I would write about it here in case anybody knows a solution, or if anyone at Oracle cares to add the functionality I need. 🙂

The problem

I was asked to audit selects against tables in a particular schema when issued by several users. For the sake of this post let’s assume the following.

  • SCHEMAOWNER : The owner of the tables that are to be audited.
  • USER1, USER2, USER3 : The three users whose select statements are to be audited.

So I decided the write an audit policy.

Option 1 : Audit all selects, regardless of schema

My first thought was to do this.

create audit policy my_select_policy
actions select
when q'~ sys_context('userenv', 'session_user') in ('USER1','USER2','USER3') ~'
evaluate per session
container=current;

The problem is it produced masses of audit records, most of which were referencing selects against objects owned by other schemas. I have so many records I can’t actually purge the audit trail. I’m having to wait until the next partition is created in a month, so I can drop the current partition and shrink the data files. 🙁

Option 2 : Explicitly list all objects to be audited

So I need to make the policy more granular, which I can do by explicitly referencing all objects I want to audit, like this.

create audit policy my_select_policy
actions select on schemaowner.tab1,
        select on schemaowner.tab2,
        select on schemaowner.tab3
when q'~ sys_context('userenv', 'session_user') in ('USER1','USER2','USER3') ~'
evaluate per session
container=current;

The problem is there are loads of tables in the schema, so doing this is a pain. I could generate the statement using a script, but even then if someone adds a new table the audit policy wouldn’t pick it up.

What I really want

What I really want is to be able to limit the action to a specific schema. The specific syntax is not important. The result is what matters. Maybe something like this.

-- Use and explicit schema reference,
create audit policy my_select_policy
  actions select on schema schemaowner
when q'~ sys_context('userenv', 'session_user') in ('USER1','USER2','USER3') ~' 
evaluate per session
container=current;

Thoughts

I don’t believe the current syntax for audit policies allows them to be limited by schema, so I’m faced with generating masses of unnecessary audit records, or having to explicitly name every table. 🙁

This all sounded kind-of familiar, and when I did a bit of Googling I found this note by Pete Finnigan. So I’m not alone in finding this frustrating.

Cheers

Tim…

What is the end goal for automation and AI?

I’ve been a big proponent of automation over the years. I recognise that automation will cause the loss of some jobs, but I’ve always assumed people would move on to other things. A consistent theme of mine was, why waste humans on mundane work when they could do something of more value?

I recently read The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov and now I feel rather uneasy about automation and AI…

I don’t want to give too much of the story away, but we are told fairly early that the planet Solaria only has 20,000 humans, and millions of robots. The robots do everything as far as the economy is concerned, and the humans are essentially idle custodians. Rather than having millions of people doing a variety of occupations, there are only the elite sitting at the top of the pile…

As I was reading this I was thinking about the economic elite on our planet and I started to feel some concern. My dream of a post-scarcity society is one where we are all equal, but I can’t imagine there are many people at the top that want to be equal. They would always want to be more than equal. Call me a pessimist, but when I think of Elon Musk calling himself the emperor of Mars, I wonder if a future post-scarcity society will be less like Star Trek, and more like Solaria…

Of course, the AI could just turn into Skynet and kill us all, but I have this feeling that greedy humans using AI and automation against the majority of the population poses the greater threat. Why have “them and us”, if there could just be “us”? 🙁

All of a sudden automation has lost some of its lustre…

Cheers

Tim…

HP-UX and Oracle 11g : Don’t let the door hit you on ass on the way out…

We had a pretty momentous occasion recently. We finally got rid of the last of our HP-UX servers, and with it the last of our Oracle 11g databases and Oracle Forms apps.

We use VMware virtual machines running Oracle Linux for nearly all our databases. We pushed really hard over the last couple of years to get everything migrated to 19c. Despite this, there were two projects that were left behind on HP-UX and Oracle 11g. They were effectively dead projects, from the time before we moved to Oracle Cloud Apps, about 5 years ago. We couldn’t get rid of them because people wanted to look at the historical data, but there was very little appetite to do anything with them…

Finally, over the last year we’ve had an archive project running, which involved moving the databases on to Oracle Linux and upgrading to 19c. That bit was easy. The other bit of the project involved building two new APEX apps to replace a 3rd party application and an old Oracle Forms 11g app. Those went live a few months ago, but there was still a lot of reluctance to actually decommission the old systems.

Recently we finally got the approval to turn off the old systems, and decommission the old HP-UX kit. When the change went through the Change Advisory Board (CAB) it was such a relief…

The kit is now decommissioned, and I’ve just been clearing the agents out of Cloud Control, so it’s finally over. No more HP-UX. No more Oracle 11g. No more Oracle Forms…

Now all we have to do is replace a whole load of Oracle Linux 7 servers, and get ready to upgrade to the next long term release of the database… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Search Trends and Oracle

Please read the update before jumping to any conclusions. 🙂

I was chatting with some folks the other day and the question was raised about if we had seen a decline in our website activity. Since the vast majority of my website traffic comes from Google searches, I figured the obvious thing to do was to look at what is happening on Google Trends in terms of search terms. That way we were not focusing on the popularity of a specific site, but on searches in general. That resulted in this rather alarming graph showing a trend over the last 20 years.

I guess we all thought this decline was at the expense of another engine, so our obvious next thought was to compare against the other relational database engines. One of the guys suggested we also compare the word “database” as well, just to see. This is the resulting graph.

It should be noted we tried variations on “sql server” and “postgresql”, but they didn’t affect the searches. Feel free to try for yourself. 🙂

So the decline in searches was not restricted to Oracle. You may notice this is related to “All Categories” of search, and the word “oracle” is not specific to the database, so I tried in “Computers & Electronics”, and we got a similar result.

For subsequent searches I switched back to “All Categories”.

If we switch to the last 5 years, things seem to have levelled off somewhat.

So the next question was if NoSQL databases were eating into the relational database market. A straight search looked interesting.

But what happens when we add Oracle back into the mix. Does the rise in popularity of some NoSQL databases account for the drop in searches for relational databases?

It doesn’t look like it. The gains in some NoSQL databases are insignificant compared to the reductions in searches for relational databases.

So we are left with a question. Why is there a drop off in searches for relational databases, when there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding uptick in alternatives?

Update : So what is really going on?

The graphs are not absolute search numbers, but normalised compared to the total Google searches that happened. Back in the day only geeks were Googling, so tech searches were a comparatively high percentage. Now everyone is Googling, the proportion of tech searches is much lower compared to the random stuff. Check out the FAQ about Google Trends data. So in our case, the trend over time of an individual term is not so important as the comparison between two search terms over time, as both should be affected in a similar way by the normalisation…

What we can see is over time the searches for different relational engines have got closer. If we are using the number of searches as a proxy for popularity, then it seems it’s a much closer game now than before.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Thanks to the folks that pointed me in the right direction about Google Trends.

PPS. I noticed the switch from 12c to 19c searches over recent years.

The Oracle ACE Program : My 18 Year Anniversary

It’s April 1st, which means it’s my 18th year anniversary of being an Oracle ACE.

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

  • 29 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
  • 24 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or current name: 31 August 2001)
  • 19 years blogging in June. (15 June 2005)
  • 18 years on the Oracle ACE Program. (01 April 2006)
  • 9 years doing videos on my YouTube channel, with some breaks of course.

Fingers crossed for next year…

Cheers

Tim…

Social Battery

For years I’ve mentioned my issues with social gatherings. I used to come back from conferences or large social gatherings and crash for a few days/weeks. When trying to describe it, it would often sound much more serious than it was. The term “social battery” is so much better for explaining things, as it doesn’t sound like I’m trying to self-diagnose some deep seated problem. 🙂

I have talked about being different people in different contexts, like “conference Tim”, “work Tim” and “home Tim”, which can sound a little schizophrenic, but I’m really just describing coping mechanisms most of us have when dealing with situations. Introverted people don’t all act in the same way. Some people are really quiet, but some people, like me, become almost hyper when they are in a group setting. I think the term “extroverted introvert” is possibly what I am. That behaviour comes with a cost. It’s so unnatural for me that it drains my social battery, and it takes a long time for that to recharge. I know other people who seem to charge their social battery by being in group situations, and their battery drains when they are alone. Everyone is different in this respect.

The pandemic made me even more aware of how my social battery works. The switch to working from home and the break from conferences was a game changer for me. I had never spent so much time alone, and it was fantastic. So much so that I still work from home, and have stopped doing conferences permanently (probably).

This is one of the reasons I rant so much about company attitudes to working from home. We are all different, and if you want to get the most out of people, you have to recognise that and use it to your advantage. I think companies that value diversity in all its forms, including neurodiversity, have a long term advantage. That’s just my opinion, and maybe I have a vested interest in believing that, but that’s how I feel. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

AI Prompt Engineer (AI-fu). The new Google-fu?

The other day I came across the term AI Prompt Engineer. It was in the context of being the next big thing in the job market. I did a bit of Googling and sure enough there are courses about it, and a number of jobs being offered. These seem to break down into two main types of role.

  1. A technical AI development role, involving understanding of AI and coding against various AI backends via APIs.
  2. A person who types in stuff to get the right outcome from specific AI tools.

As mentioned, the first is a technical development role, but the second seems like AI-fu to me…

Google-fu

Here is the Wikipedia definition of Google-fu.

“Skill in using search engines (especially Google) to quickly find useful information on the Internet.”

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Google-fu

After all these years I’m still surprised how weak people’s Google-fu is. Searching for information requires knowing what to include in your search criteria, as well as evaluating the results to make sure they are actually what you need.

If you don’t understand how to filter the results using targeted search terms, you may get incorrect or misleading results. If you don’t understand the subject matter, you have no way of validating correctness of the responses.

AI-fu

I’ve made up the term AI-fu. I can’t see any references to it on the internet. The closest I can find is ChatGPT-fu, which I also made up here. 🙂 I said Google-fu is about providing the appropriate inputs, and validating the outputs. I would suggest that AI-fu is very similar.

If you’ve played around with ChatGPT you will know there is a degree of “garbage in, garbage out” involved. You have to refine your inputs, either by altering the original question, or following a chain of thought (CoT) process.

How do you know you have a suitable result? Well, you have to understand the subject matter, and do some fact checking to make sure you are not generating garbage. If you don’t understand that a human hand typically has 5 digits, you can’t tell if that 7 fingered monstrosity you’ve just generated is wrong. 🙂

Thoughts

I suspect those people that have acquired good Google-fu, will also acquire good AI-fu. Those people who have proved to have consistently weak Google-fu, are unlikely to ever developer strong AI-fu.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. If you want a certificate in AI-fu, please send £500 to my PayPal… 😉

Automation : Increasing pressure on an existing constraint

Yesterday I tweeted that I was reminded of this post.

I was reminded of it because of something that is happening to me at work, so I thought I would talk about it here.

Production lines

If you’ve read anything about DevOps you will know it came from manufacturing. If you didn’t know that, check out The Goal, which was the basis for The Phoenix Project.

Manufacturing typically uses production lines made up of multiple stations, where each station performs a specific task, and the product moves forward through the stations until it is complete. If one station is slower than the others, it will become a blocker. Product will start to queue up behind it, and downstream stations will become starved. So production lines only work well if they are planned to enable a consistent flow.

What’s more, you can only sell the product when it is completed, so we could describe the product as having no value until it is finished and with the customer.

It’s not just about manufacturing

The processes born out of manufacturing also work really well for other industries. I would suggest most things can be described like a production line, and as soon as you do that, a similar approach can be adopted to identify and fix the constraints.

Tech is an obvious one, and variations on DevOps have grown in popularity because of that. My sister in law works in a medical practice, and we’ve discussed the processes used in the administration side of it. As a result of our discussions she’s started to use Kanban boards to visualise the flow of work.

Back to my problem

So with the concept of production lines and constraints in mind, we jump back to my problem…

We are in the process of replacing loads of Oracle Linux 7 servers with either Oracle Linux 8 or Oracle Linux 9, depending on vendor support. The first three links in that production line are as follows.

  • VMs are provisioned.
  • Operating system customisations are run.
  • Database or app server is installed and configured.

We are not perfect, but we’ve got pretty good at this part of the production line. When we are finished, the systems have to be tested, and go through various processes to get them live and used by the business. Those parts of the production line that follow us are slow due to a number of factors. So our improvements in the production line have just made things harder for those steps that follow us. A simplified view of the Kanban board looks something like this.

The obvious thing to do here is focus on the constraints and start working on downstream links in the chain, to improve the overall flow. That’s where we hit organisation and culture barriers, so we are pretty much stumped…

Thoughts

I’m pretty happy with what we’ve done over the last few years. We’ve definitely improved several aspects of our systems because of automation, but at the same time I can’t help thinking we’ve achieved nothing because ultimately the work is not getting completed as fast as it’s started.

I wrote here about reframing the goal, and I have to do that as copium. Unfortunately copium only goes so far… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

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