Cloud – Page 3 – Running in the clouds

Google Bare Metal for Oracle.

Since the first days of working in the Google public cloud there have been debates about the possibility to move an Oracle workload to GCP. The major concerns were coming not from the technical challenges but rather from Oracle’s licensing policies and guidelines. In the famous Oracle’s document about licensing Oracle software in the public cloud it was stated – “This policy applies to cloud computing environments from the following vendors: Amazon Web Services – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform (collectively, the ‘Authorized Cloud Environments’)”. So the Google Cloud was not listed as an ‘Authorized Cloud Environment’ and it was unclear how to apply the Oracle licensing there. I believe it will be sorted in time but in the meanwhile as a solution Google presented a Bare Metal Service as the platform for Oracle workload.

From Oracle to Google Big Query by Kafka

Last week while checking my twitter feed I found a tweet from Confluent with an announcement about a new Kafka connector for Oracle database as a source. We had an Oracle connector before but it was working scanning the source tables and, as a result, adding a load to the source database. But that one was different and we got a connector which could get the changes from Oracle redo logs. I started to test it using my Kafka dev environment in the Google Cloud and one of my sandbox databases in the Oracle cloud. Here I would like to share how to start to test it and my very first experience with the tool.

IPSec VPN between OCI and AWS.

I’ve been using the OCI and AWS clouds for a number of years, but primarily it was either one or another. Only in a few cases was it required to connect each other and mainly get data from an AWS S3 bucket. But with the new OCI services, the idea of using both clouds is getting more attractive, and multi-cloud environments become more common. One of the main challenges for such a layout is the network. We have several options using dedicated connections or 3d party tools deployed on both sides, and all of them have their pros and cons. Today, I would like to talk about the most simplistic case when we use only native services on both sides and establish IPSec VPN connections between two clouds.

The new 21 is already here for Oracle Autonomous.

You’ve probably already seen in the news that the Oracle 21c is available and saw some tweets and blogs about the new release. But did you know that not only DBCS with “normal” cloud databases available but also the Autonomous version?

Cucumbers, coffee and chocolate or how to create non-cdb on Exadata Cloud at Customer.

For those who are puzzled by the title here is a short explanation. I didn’t pay too much attention to what I had in my fridge and one day I found only a couple of cucumbers, chocolate and some coffee. That was not too bad but I couldn’t call it a proper nutrition diet. It was at the same time when I was exploring a possibility to have a non-cdb 12.1 Oracle database on an Exadata Cloud at Customer (ExaCC). One might think the blog is about comparing the unusual diet with the non-cdb deployment on a cloud environment telling that you should not really use non-cdb as you probably shouldn’t eat only cucumbers, chocolate and coffee. But it is not true, the blog is how to create such non-cdb on an ExaCC.

Oracle OCI Resource Manager Discovery.

If you work with Terraform, you are quite familiar with the situation when a lot of resources have already been deployed manually. What options do we have in such a case? The first one is to use the native Terraform Resource Discovery and create the state file, which can be imported to your enterprise configuration. But if you plan to use Resource Manager in OCI, you can use the new Resource Manager Discovery feature. It creates a stack discovering your resources in a compartment.

Oracle ExaCC Gen 2 new features and improvements.

Some time ago after the last Oracle Open World Christine Kivi wrote a blog stating that this is not “your father’s Oracle” anymore . The rapid development and continuous improvements in Oracle cloud is one of the signs that Oracle is changing. The generation 2 Exadata cloud at customer (ExaCC) was released on that last OOW 19 and initially had some limitations in options and interface. Oracle team promised to fix the issues and provide new functionality, planning some major updates in the next calendar year (2020). And so far as I can see Oracle team is working delivering the promised. Here I will try to review some of the new features implemented for the last several months. This is going to be a relatively long post. You can go to the bottom, read the summary and read in details only about changes you are interested in.

Migrating a new PDB to the existing 19c DataGuard on ExaCC.

We’ve already discussed how to migrate databases from a standalone 12.2 database to a pluggable database (PDB) in a 19c container in the Oracle cloud. But what if the target container database (CDB) is already part of a Data Guard configuration and has several PDB in it? I will try to go through the main steps on how to do that without breaking the replication.

Moving Oracle database to the cloud. 12.2 standalone to 19C RAC PDB.

I see more and more Oracle databases are moving to the public cloud or to a hybrid cloud solution. Depending on the platform, size and used options it could be a different path but the general approach boils down to three main options – Oracle RMAN backup and restore, Oracle Data Guard or Oracle Data Pump with or without transportable tablespaces. Here I want to share our approach for migration from 12.2 standalone database to 19c RAC container as PDB in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Oracle Zero Downtime Migration troubleshooting.

The Oracle Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) tool has been created to help with Oracle databases migrations. It saves time and automates many tasks. The saved effort is getting bigger and accumulates on scale when you need to move multiple databases. Behind the scenes it uses the very well known Oracle Data Guard. As a result you have good solid technology on the basis but at the same time limited to what the DataGuard can do and what it cannot. All details and documentation are available here. The tool works fine when all prerequisites are met but when you hit an issue you need to dig in and troubleshoot. Here I will try to share some experience with the ZDM troubleshooting. Please note that the information in the blog is actual for the 19.2 version of ZDM and it is possible that the behaviour will be different in the future versions.

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