Tag: Oracle Developer Community

ODC Appreciation Day 2018 : It’s a Wrap (#ThanksODC)

Yesterday was the Oracle Developer Community ODC Appreciation Day 2018 (#ThanksODC).

Big thanks to everyone who took the time to join in. Here is the list of posts I saw in chronological order. If I missed you out, give me a shout and I’ll add you. 🙂

As always, it was good to see some posts in languages other than English. I’m particularly happy about the “Blog Birthday” celebration for Flora B., who started blogging at last years event! 🙂

There were a few people who forgot to include #ThanksODC in their tweets. I think all got picked up and retweeted including the hashtag by me or someone else. If I missed any, please let me know. I laughed at the inclusion of #ThanksOracleBase in a couple of tweets. 🙂

Once again, thanks everyone for getting involved and of course #ThanksODC! 🙂

Same sort of time next year! Hopefully not so close to OpenWorld. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

ODC Appreciation Day : Effective Evangelism – Staying Positive

I’m coming at this year’s event from a different angle…

If you’ve ever been on the internet, you will have noticed negativity and drama get a lot of clicks. I try to keep the website, blog and my community contributions positive, but occasionally frustration gets the better of me and I launch into a tirade on the blog or on twitter. As soon as I do the hit rate shoots up. Drama draws attention.

In the short term this might feel good as you are getting more attention than you have previously, but it’s short lived and sometimes bridges get burned, leaving you in a worse position than you were before.

If you are in this for the long haul, you are far better trying to take the  positive approach. This doesn’t mean keeping quiet about stuff you don’t like, but the way you frame it can make a big difference. Rather than this.

“Feature X is crap.”

You might be better placed to write.

“Feature X would be better if… “

It’s not always easy, and I have some history of doing the former, but from experience I can tell you constructive criticism goes down a lot better than insults. 🙂

It’s up to you to decide how you want to contribute to the community, but I would suggest you try to build a positive community around you, and distance yourself from those that draw you to the dark side. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

ODC Appreciation Day : Silent Installation and Configuration (Automation) : #ThanksODC

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:

  • Faster.
  • More reliable.
  • More repeatable.
  • Work fine on the cloud and in Docker.
  • Easily maintainable and can be version controlled.

If you’re not using this stuff already, do yourself a favour and give it a go. You will thank yourself!

Cheers

Tim…