Oracle related rants (and lots of off-topic stuff)…
In today’s video we’ll cover the installation and configuration of Ansible.
The video is based on the following article, and will be the first in a series of videos.
You might find some useful stuff here.
The star of today’s video is Neil Chandler, who took time out of his busy bathroom schedule to record this clip.
Cheers
Tim…
In today’s video we’ll demonstrate how to install Oracle Express Edition 21c on Oracle Linux 8.
The video is based on this article.
Here are some other things you might find useful.
The star of today’s video is Martin Widlake, doing his best Monty Python impression.
Cheers
Tim…
The release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.5 was officially announced last week, but I think it’s been available for download for a little longer. The first I noticed was the official announcement though. 🙂
That prompted the usual flurry of articles.
As well as the articles, you can find the Vagrant builds of Cloud Control 13.5 on Ol7 and OL8 in my Vagrant GitHub repo here.
Our current installation is running on an Oracle Linux 6 VM, so I was just about to start a new build on a new OS, which would have the added bonus of allowing us to use Oracle 19c under the hood. Now I can go straight to 13.5, which is nice.
I’ve mentioned before, we use EMCLI to add targets and jobs into Cloud Control, so rather than upgrading as I normally do, this time I’ll probably do a clean build on the new kit and gradually migrate services across to it.
Happy upgrading! 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Today’s video is a run through installing the Docker engine on Oracle Linux 7 (OL7).
You can get the commands mentioned in this video from the following article.
You can see my other Docker posts and builds here.
The star of today’s video is Robyn Sands, formerly of the Oracle Real World Performance Group, and now something to do with some fruit company… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Today’s video is a quick run through a manual installation of Oracle Linux 8.
I put out a number of articles about Oracle Linux 8 when the beta was first released. I’ve now updated them where appropriate.
I’ve also gone through my Vagrant builds for 18c on OL8 and 19c on OL8. They work fine, although there isn’t a Vagrant box for OL8 yet, so I had to make my own using the method similar to this.
Remember, OL8 has only just come out, so the database is not certified on it yet. I’ve put at note a the top of the database installation guides saying as much.
The star of today’s video is Mahir M. Quluzade. He was grinning most of the way through filming this. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
The folks at Dbvisit recently released version 9 of their Dbvisit standby product.
It’s been a while since I last played with the product, so I downloaded the free trial and gave it a whirl.
I have to admit I forgot just how easy it is to work with. It feels pretty much like “unzip and go”. The result of my playtime was this article.
I also knocked up a Vagrant build, so I can easily recreate it. You can find that here.
I stuck to a basic configuration of a single instance primary (node1) and standby (node2), with the console on a separate VM (console). If you want to try something more exotic, or you are using Windows, you can get more information from the Installing Dbvisit Standby documentation.
Cheers
Tim…
PS. This isn’t a sponsored post. I’ve known the folks at Dbvisit for years so I keep an eye on what they are doing.
A few weeks ago I put out a post about 19c installations and all that good stuff. That post was using the 19.2 release, which was not the official on-prem release of the product. Now Oracle 19c (19.3) has dropped and is available from here, and here, this post is just to say all those builds have been updated to use this 19.3 release. I also noticed the 19c preinstall package is available from yum.oracle.com.
Not surprisingly, I took the Vagrant and Docker builds I did for 19.2 and just changed the environment variables holding the software zip names, and everything worked just fine. Here are the associated articles, with those minor edits to reflect this version change.
I’ve committed a whole bunch of stuff to GitHub.
Automation is awesome! 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I’ve been playing around with Oracle Database 19c on LiveSQL since it was upgraded, and I pretty much thought that would be what I was stuck with until the on-prem release, as I don’t have an Exadata and it’s not on Oracle Cloud DBCS yet. Having seen a bunch people doing stuff on VMs, I got a bit frustrated and looked on eDelivery and low and behold the 19c software is available for download, even if you don’t have a Exadata CSI. I’m sure 18c was restricted during this period…
I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be supported to use this for anything real (that wasn’t Exadata of course) until the on-prem drop, which will probably be 19.3 if they repeat what happened for 18c, but it does allow you to have a play.
Having a bunch of Vagrant environments for 18c already, meant it was pretty easy to test a whole bunch of 19c stuff within a few minutes, as most of the basics are very similar. Just minor changes to package recommendations. As a result I’ve pushed out the following stuff in the last couple of evenings.
Along the way I’ve committed a whole bunch of stuff to GitHub.
It should be obvious, but remember this is literally the first time I’ve done this stuff with 19c, so things will change over time. I just wanted to try some stuff out to see what happened, and have some test environments to play with while I’m checking out the new features. Once the real on-prem drop happens I’ll bring these up to date.
If nothing else, this is once again proof of how awesome automation is. A few minor tweaks and boom, there’s a new set of test environments. 🙂
Now I can get back to doing what I was meant to be doing… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Hot on the release of Oracle Database 18.3.0 On-Prem for Linux, I got on the case with doing some installations. The first of which can be found here.
I few things to point out about these…
First, I’ve gone with a read-write Oracle home. I like the idea of the read-only home, but I’ve not played around with it enough at this point to commit.
The other thing is the Oracle home path itself. Currently I’m using “18.0.0”, rather than “18.3.0”. This feels a little strange to me, but I’m not sure how the Release Updates (RUs) will work out for this. I’m guessing what I’ll end up doing is creating a new Oracle home when a RU drops, then switch across to it, so it would be more appropriate to use 18.3.0, with a switch to 18.4.0 later. I’m still trying to decide how I want to play this. If you look at the SQL*Plus banner you will see this.
Connected to: Oracle Database 18c Enterprise Edition Release 18.0.0.0.0 - Production Version 18.3.0.0.0
So neither of these choices feel bad. 🙂
I usually post pictures of the installer, but I think this is sending the wrong message. IMHO you shouldn’t be installing this way, so this time I’ve made the break and only posted the silent installation.
In addition to the articles I’ve got some Vagrant builds for it (OL7, F28). The OL7 one also includes APEX and ORDS etc.
I’ve got a couple more things in the pipeline, which will probably come out tonight. We shall see.
Cheers
Tim…
Here is my entry for the Oracle Developer Community ODC Appreciation Day (#ThanksODC).
I’ve been mentioning automation a lot recently, both in relation to the cloud and on-prem. The OpenWorld announcements about the Autonomous Database service are not the first thing Oracle has done to ease automation of repetitive tasks. In fact, Oracle has quite a long history of making automation of installation and configuration easy.
I’m not sure what version introduced silent installations of the database, but I first wrote about them when using Oracle 9i (here), with the article changing a lot over the years. In addition to making installations faster, more repeatable and less error prone, they are also important these days if you are using a cloud provider for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), since using X emulation to perform tasks can be super-slow. Over the years I’ve also written about silent installations of WebLogic, Oracle Forms, ODI and OBIEE to name but a few.
In addition to installations, Oracle has made silent configuration possible too. Running the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) in silent mode is pretty simple (here). WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) is a not always easy, but it is a really powerful way to script build processes for WebLogic servers (here). If you are using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, you will find an API for pretty much everything, allowing you to script using EMCLI (here).
You can find a number of articles I’ve written related to silent installation and configuration using the links above, or grouped under this section of my website.
A good knowledge of this subject is important if you want to start checking out Docker, because you will be doing silent builds and configuration for everything.
When you are learning something new it is nice to use GUI screens, as they often feel a little simpler at first and sometimes give you a little more context about what you are doing. Once you’ve covered the basics you should really switch to scripting, as it will make you more efficient. When I first started to manage WebLogic servers I resisted the switch to using WLST for quite some time. It seemed a little complicated and I was in denial until Lonneke Dikmans persuaded me to try it. Once I got into it I never looked back! 🙂
To summarise the advantages of scripting your installations and configuration, they are:
If you’re not using this stuff already, do yourself a favour and give it a go. You will thank yourself!
Cheers
Tim…
