I have referred to Packer in some of my cloud-related presentations as an example of a tool for creating immutable infrastructure. In addition to the cloud, Packer supports a great many other build targets as well. Since I work with VirtualBox and Vagrant a lot, Packer’s ability to create Vagrant base boxes is super awesome. Combined with local box versioning I can build new Vagrant systems in almost no time. More importantly though, I can simply kick the process off, grab a coffee, and when I’m back, enjoy a new build of my Oracle Linux Vagrant base box.

This post is about how to make your log files being aggregated in a single place and easy searchable via a convenient web interface.

One of the features I haven’t seen blogged about is the option to provide SYS and SYSTEM passwords (among other parameters) to dbca via a wallet. This is documented in chapter 2 of the Database Administration Guide 19c.

[oracle@server1 ~]$ dbca -silent -createDatabase -help
...
        [-useWalletForDBCredentials  Specify true to load database credentials from wallet]
            -dbCredentialsWalletLocation 
...

I was curious how to use this feature as it might provide slightly better security when deploying new databases via dbca. It turned out it wasn’t too hard in the end, and I decided to briefly put my efforts into this short article.

Since I can never remember how to install Virtualbox Guest Additions I thought I’d write it down. Maybe it’ll save you a few minutes; I know it will save me a lot of time ;)

For this post I used the latest versions at the time of writing:

• Virtualbox 6.1.10 for Linux (my host is running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS)
• Oracle Linux 8.2 (V996906-01.iso)

The VM was installed using the “minimal-environment” group and booted into UEK 6. I believe this change came with Oracle Linux (OL) 8.2 and I seem to remember OL 8.1 used the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) by default. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, it’s just an observation. I am going to stick with UEK 6 in my lab, instructions are different from using RHCK.

By Franck Pachot

.
Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) is a Linux distribution which is binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). However, unlike RHEL, OEL is open source, free to download, free to use, free to distribute, free to update and gets free bug fixes. And there are more frequent updates in OEL than in CentOS, the free base of RHEL. You can pay a subscription for additional support and features (like Ksplice or Dtrace) in OEL. It can run the same kernel as RHEL but also provides, still for free, the ‘unbreakable kernel’ (UEK) which is still compatible with RHEL but enhanced with optimizations, recommended especially when running Oracle products.

Hopefully this post saves you a few minutes looking the procedure up. I know it’ll save me some time ;) In this rather lengthy article I’d like to cover how I copied a SQL Plan Baseline from one database to another. If you find this procedure useful, please ensure your system is appropriately licensed for it and test it first!

My Setup

My source database is named ORA19NCDB, patched to 19.7.0 running on Oracle Linux 7x/UEK 5. As I do so often, I’m using Dominic Giles’s Swingbench as the source for this experiment. This is the query in question:

Today’s video shows me using some of my existing Docker builds with Podman. Specifically a 19c database container and an Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) container.

For those with an understanding of Docker, it should look really familiar, but it does introduce a twist in the form of a pod.

The video is based on this article.

• Podman : A Basic Example of Using Podman With Dockerfiles (Oracle Database and ORDS) on Oracle Linux 8 (OL8)

You can see more information about containers here.

In today’s video we’ll take a look at installing Podman on Oracle Linux 8 (OL8).

This is based on the article here.

• Install Podman on Oracle Linux 8 (OL8)

You can see more information about containers here.

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Fedora 32 was released at the end of April (see here). Here comes the standard warning.

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When Oracle Linux 8 (OL8) was released, one of the first things I did was check for the Oracle supplied Docker engine. Nothing.