As part of my talk at (the absolutely amazing) Riga Dev Days 2019 I deployed Oracle Restful Data Services (ORDS) in Minikube as my application’s endpoint. I’ll blog about deploying ORDS 19 in docker and running it on Kubernetes later, but before I can do so I want to briefly touch about persistent storage in Minikube because I saw it as a pre-requisite.

In the previous blog posts, we learned how to set up the first part of a standard shell script- how to interactively set variables, including how to pass them as part of the script execution. In this next step, we’ll use those to build out Azure resources. If you’re working on-premises, you can use this type of scripting with SQL Server 2019 Linux but will need to use CLI commands and SQLCMD. I will cover this in later posts, but honestly, the cloud makes deployment quicker for any business to get what they need deployed and with the amount of revenue riding on getting to market faster, this should be the first choice of any DBA with vision.

Almost every Linux or Unix person has seen the help forum post from a novice looking for an answer to a frustrating problem and the arrogant fool that responds with “Just type in rm -rf / and it will fix the problem.” For anyone who is part of the “do no harm” technical community, this can make us wish for a way to revoke the arrogant fool’s privileges to the internet— permanently.

Sometimes it is necessary to invoke a SQL script in bash or otherwise in an unattended way. SQLcl has become my tool of choice because it’s really lightweight and can do a lot. If you haven’t worked with it yet, you really should give it a go.

Hello from Atlanta, where I’m preparing for tomorrow’s SQL Saturday and arrived for the great news announcing this year’s PASS Summit 2019 Learning Pathways.

These sessions are two or more sessions to provide a more complete learning opportunity for the attendee.  I’ll be part of two of these pathways:

In Part I, we started with some scripting basics, as in, how to write a script. This included the concepts of breaking a script into sections, (introduction, body and conclusion)

For Part II, we’ll start with the BASH script “introduction”.

The introduction in a BASH script should begin the same in all scripts.

1. Set the shell to be used for the script
2. Set the response to failure on any steps, (exit or ignore)
3. Add in a step for testing, but comment out or remove when in production

For our scripts, we’ll keep to the BASH format that is used by the template scripts, ensuring a repeatable and easy to identify introduction.

Last week I blogged about the option to install Oracle’s Instant Client via the public YUM repository. If you go ahead and try this, there is one thing you will undoubtedly notice: file locations are rather unusual if you have worked with Oracle for a while. This is true at least for the 19c Instant Client, it might be similar for older releases although I didn’t check. I’d like to thank @oraclebase for prompting me to write this short article!

Installing the 19.3 “Basic” Instant Client package

So to start this post I am going to install the 19.3 “Basic” package on my Oracle Linux 7.6 lab environment:

Many applications require Oracle’s instant client to enable connectivity with the database. In the past, getting hold of the instant client required you to agree to the license agreement before you could download the software. For a little while now, Oracle offers a YUM repository with the instant client RPMs. There are a couple of announcements to that effect, for example on Oracle’s Linux blog. It’s a great step ahead for usability, and I really appreciate the move. After a small exchange on Twitter I had to give this a go and see how this works. The following article is a summary of what I learned.

In the past few months I have spent some time trying to better understand Kubernetes and how application developers can make use of it in the context of the Oracle database. In this post I’m sharing what I learned along that way. Please be careful: this is very much a moving target, and I wouldn’t call myself an expert in the field. If you find anything in this post that could be done differently/better, please let me know!

By the way, I am going to put something similar together where Oracle Restful Data Services (ORDS) will provide a different, more popular yet potentially more difficult-to-get-right connection method.

Azure Directory is available with Linux SQL Server 2019 in Preview and as I was setting it up in my Azure environment on a Linux Red Hat 7.3 VM, I was, as many are, happy that they list the commands for the Azure CLI to set up authentication with Azure Directory, but was concerned, that with so many new to Linux, that they didn’t describe in the steps WHY we were running certain commands or setting best practices around Linux database server design.

The setup expects that you already have a Linux VM and SQL 2019 already up and running. The first step they go into is role assignment for the AD login, setting the AD login up as the VM Administrator.