JSON Database and APEX Application Development on Oracle Cloud Free Tier

If you follow my Sister-in-law Maria Colgan on Twitter, you will already know the JSON Database and APEX Application Development are now available on the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. For a full list of things on the free tier, see here.

I was on a call with Oracle prior to the release of the APEX Application Development Service, and one of the points I made was it should be available on the free tier, but unfortunately that’s not what happened with the initial release. I’m glad to see that situation has been rectified pretty quickly.

When you are trying to win hearts and minds I think it’s really important to reduce the barriers to entry. These services were available on the free trial, time and credit permitting, but I don’t think the free trials last long enough for people to get a real feel for a service. Adding these to the free tier will result in a number of things.

  • More people will be able to try them and decide if these are the correct services for them.
  • People will be able to live with these services for an extended period of time, and get a true feel for them. Unless you are really well prepared, you can easily do very little with a free trial. The free tier allows you to take your time and make sure you are making the correct move.
  • The more people using the services, the more feedback Oracle will get, which will ultimately make the services better.

I’m really glad this decision has been made!

If you are new to Oracle Cloud, I have some resources that should help you get going. Sign up for the free tier.

Oracle Cloud : Free Tier Account Sign-Up

The bottom of that article has links to lots of other Oracle Cloud posts, including these links.

I’ve also got some Terraform articles, so you can learn to automate the deployment of services on Oracle Cloud, including the JSON Database and APEX Application Development services.

Have fun!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. If you’re not following Maria on Twitter, what’s wrong with you?

APEX Application Development Service on Oracle Cloud

A few days ago Oracle announced the APEX Application Development Service on Oracle Cloud.

I had a sneak peak of this service last October. I’ve used APEX since it was know as Project Marvel, but despite this I’m renowned as the worst APEX developer on the planet. I think I was invited as a control subject… 🙂

The main thing I’m expecting from any platform is it must be as “administration free” as possible. APEX is a low-code development tool. Some APEX developers will have a lot of database administration skills, but some will not. I wanted to see a service that got people up and developing safely, with as little administration fuss as possible. I think that’s what Oracle have delivered, which makes me really happy.

These new APEX instances are built on Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) instances, with some of the functionality disabled. There is a simpler route to create them using the “APEX Application Development > APEX Instances” menu, but you can create them through the normal Autonomous Database creation screens also.

Existing ATP instances can be accessed through the simplified interface, which is a nice touch.

I did my own run through of setting up an APEX instance here. I’m not going to talk much about the service, because there are lots of great APEX bloggers that are a better source of information than me. Make sure you check them out!

Happy APEXing!

Cheers

Tim…

Cloud First (again)

cloudDuring OpenWorld I wrote about my thoughts on Cloud First, an approach Oracle is taking for some of its products now. A discussion on Oracle-L has sparked this post.

One of things I hoped Cloud First would accomplish was to allow Oracle to fix more of the bugs before they dropped the on-premise release. Let’s look at the current 12.2 timeline.

  • 20th September (approx): The first 12.2 product was the Exadata Express, where you get a PDB in a fully managed cloud service, was released at OpenWorld. At least up until a few days ago this service was running was 12.2.0.0.3. That doesn’t sound like an on-premise release number to me.
  • 4-5th November: At the end of last week the Database Cloud Service (DBaaS) on Oracle Public Cloud got an update to allow you to provision 12.2.0.1 instances. That sounds kind-of like the version number of a first on-premise release to me. Also, the DBaaS offering is not automatically patched, so Oracle must have a reasonable level of confidence with this release if they are happy to put production DBaaS customers on it. 🙂 There is no installation media on this service, but there is a zip of the “app/oracle/product/12.2.0/dbhome_1” directory structure in the “/scratch/db/db12201_bits.tar.gz” file.
  • Currently the Database Cloud Service (Virtual Image), which builds a VM with installation media in the “/scratch” directory, does not allow 12.2.0.1 yet. Either they’ve not had time to finish this yet, or they don’t want to make getting the installation media so easy. 🙂
  • 8th November: There has been some limited 12.2 documentation around since the release of Exadata Express, but the “proper” 12.2 documentation was released yesterday. There are still some missing bits, like the install/upgrade manuals, which is not surprising as they are not necessary for Exadata Express or DBaaS.

So as far as I’m concerned, we have only just got a product that resembles an on-premise release now. The meaning of Cloud First will be judged by how long it takes from *now* for the on-premise release to drop. If it happens soon I will be in the “Cloud First has worked out OK” camp. If there is an extended period between now and the on-premise release, I will be switching my allegiance to the conspiracy theory camp. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. It’s possible there is still some work to put together conventional installation media. I have no knowledge of the internal processed at Oracle.

OTN Cloud Developer Challenge 2016

cloudThe Oracle ACE Program decided to tag an extra day on to the front of the AMIS 25 Beyond the Horizon conference for the “OTN Cloud Developer Challenge”. The idea was for teams of ACEs to get together and build applications using Oracle Cloud services. It was originally called a cloud hackathon, but got renamed to something that didn’t contain the word “hack”. 🙂

My team was made up of Debra, Heli, Gurcan and Osama (who couldn’t make it due to visa issues 🙁 ). The plan was to create a schema in a cloud database. Expose the tables as REST services using ORDS. These REST services would then be consumed to produce a mobile application using some of the mobile technologies on the Oracle cloud. Unfortunately, we were a group made up of database people, so the last bit of the puzzle proved rather tricky/impossible for us. 🙂 So that we could produce a POC, we cheated and used APEX to push out some screens. The work for this continued the following day. 🙂

Towards the end of the day we broke away from the challenge and joined the AMIS 25 Beyond the Horizon introductory drinks. At about 21:00 I headed back to the hotel, did some washing, then crashed out for the night.

Cheers

Tim…

 

Paris and Netherlands Trip

Early tomorrow I start a small series of events in Paris and the Netherlands.

Tomorrow I fly to Paris to speak at the Paris Province Oracle Meetup. It will be my first time in Paris, so I’ll try to hit a few of the sites in the city centre if I can. I was originally hoping to fly out the same night as I have an event the following day, but the flights for that didn’t work out. Instead I’m staying in a hotel at the airport. I’ve got an early flight out of Charles de Gualle airport, so I figured I’d take the easy (but boring) approach of staying at the airport.

The next morning I fly to Amsterdam, take a train, then a taxi to the hotel, followed by a taxi to the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge (formerly known as the Hackaton). It started life as an extra day tagged on to an AMIS event by the Oracle ACE Program, like an ACE Briefing, but became a hackathon. I’m not sure if other people are allowed into it, but a few of us have got into teams and we are going to try and develop stuff with Oracle Cloud services. It’s going to be a bit of a magical mystery tour as most of the people in my team are database people and know nothing about the developer and mobile cloud services. If we are able to produce something with them, it will prove they are easy. 🙂

amisThe next two days are the AMIS 25 – BEYOND THE HORIZON event, which is a two day Oracle conference, celebrating 25 years of AMIS. In addition to the sessions, the hackathon teams will still be beavering away with their projects. 🙂

There are three days between this event and the next, so I decided to book myself into a hotel in the centre of Amsterdam for 3 days. It’s about 25+ years since I was in Amsterdam and I can’t remember a thing about the city. Both previous trips were with a gang of university friends and we pretty much slept through the day and partied at night.

I’ve been watching Casey Neistat‘s vlogs for some time and recently he spent a few days in Amsterdam and it looked really nice. Rather than staying in a hostel and seeing the city by night, this time I’m staying in a proper hotel and I’m going to take a look at the city by day. Getting old? Yeah! 🙂

oghThe last event of this mini-tour is the DBA and SQL Celebration by the Dutch Oracle User (OGH). This was actually the first event I was invited to and the rest just kind-of slotted in around it. It’s nice when you can get several events in to a single trip. It just feels more worthwhile somehow. 🙂

If you are coming to any of the events, it’ll be good to see you!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. If you can ask the French Truckers not to affect my travel plans that would be really nice! 🙂

 

Video: Database as a Service (DBaaS) on Oracle Cloud

The latest video on my YouTube Channel is a run through of using the Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering on Oracle Cloud.

There have been a few minor changes in the interface since I last ran through capturing images, so the related article has been brought up to date.

I used my dad for the cameo in this video. Hopefully this will help him get a little more recognition, as he’s pretty much a nobody on the Oracle scene at the moment. With your help this could change!

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Almost as soon as I released this blog post the footage was out of date as Oracle released some minor changes to the interface. I rerecorded the video and re-uploaded it, so it is up to date as of now. All links from my website and this blog post point to the new video. If you have read this post via an RSS reader, you may still be seeing the old version of the post, and as a result see the link to the video as broken. But in that case, you won’t be able to read this either. 🙂