Oracle OCI and Azure inter-cloud link. Good option for a hybrid cloud.

Not long time ago Oracle and Microsoft announced about new level of cooperation in the public cloud interlinking their clouds providing ability to use each of the cloud where they are the best. For example it allows to run application on Azure and use an Oracle database in the Oracle OCI. It was possible before for some regions but would involve multiple steps on both sides involving a 3d party network provider to interlink Oracle FastConnect and Azure ExpressRoute. Now it can be done using Azure and Oracle OCI interfaces only. The option so far exists only for US Washington DC area where you have OCI Ashburn and Azure Washington DC regions.  I tried it and found it working but not without some surprises. Continue reading “Oracle OCI and Azure inter-cloud link. Good option for a hybrid cloud.”

Keep money in check in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

With any cloud environment, it becomes easy to start a new resource whether it is a database or a compute instance. It is like walking to a giant department store with unlimited credit on your card. Too often we find that somebody has fired a new instance and left it forgotten to run over holidays or weekend. Sometimes it is left by purpose to run some tasks but in many cases, it is just forgotten. That ease of consumption of cloud resources can lead to unexpectedly high bills by the end of the month. It would be very much helpful to have some kind of visibility and control of our spendings there. In the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we have some tools and ways how to be notified about the usage of the resources. In this post, I am going to talk about the budget tool and monitoring. Continue reading “Keep money in check in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”

Copy files to Oracle OCI cloud object storage from command line.

This blog post is bit longer than usual but I wanted to cover at least three options to upload files to the Oracle OCI object storage. If you need to just upload one file you can stop reading after the first option since it covers probably most of needs to upload a single file. But if you want a bit more it makes sense to check other options too. Continue reading “Copy files to Oracle OCI cloud object storage from command line.”

Oracle Active DataGuard on AWS RDS

Reading the latest updates and news I found that AWS has introduced a read-only replica for their AWS RDS for Oracle with the Active DataGuard technology behind that. It allowed clients offload reporting and some read-only activity to the standby freeing the primary Oracle database for transactions. It was possible to use the Data Guard before but only on EC2 type installation of Oracle and it was supposed to be fully configured managed by the customers. Continue reading “Oracle Active DataGuard on AWS RDS”

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-factor authentication

For some time we didn’t have a multi-factor authentication in the Oracle cloud and those short-lived numeric codes were one of the best way to reinforce your protection and prevent a bad actor to break your credentials. It is not 100% protection but it is well better than a username and a password. Just recently I read in the Oracle Infrastructure cloud blog about new native multi-factor authentication for Identity and Access Management (IAM) system on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Of course, I went directly to my account and started to test it. Continue reading “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-factor authentication”

Oracle 19c on LiveSQL

I used to write about the Oracle free service for developers livesql.oracle.com in the past. For those who work with Oracle databases and haven’t tested it I recommend go and try. It runs with a “SQL Developer like” interface with the ability to test syntax for your SQL queries, packages or procedures and provide a space where you can create small tables and try different things. Also, you have access to some shared example schema with data which can be used in your demonstrations and tests. The service runs on an Oracle Exadata hardware, supports HCC compression and uses the latest Oracle database software. And the version of the database software is the main topic of this today’s small post.
Today is the middle of January of 2019. We all know the Oracle naming for new versions of software reflects the year when it is issued. And today in the very first month of the new 2019 year we already can try shiny, new Oracle Database 19c. You have already guessed how you can do it. Continue reading “Oracle 19c on LiveSQL”

First Touch Penalty On AWS Cloud

(first time published in March 2018 some information may not be correct anymore)
A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion about AWS RDS with one of my colleagues and he mentioned some unexpected IO problem during migration. It was during production cutover when they switched from the old environment on-prem to the freshly restored database on RDS. The migration itself is out of scope for the today’s topic. We are going to point our attention to the unexpected IO problem. They should have plenty of IO bandwidth and everything was totally fine when they tested it before, but somehow many of the queries to the database were performing extremely slow for around 30 or 40 minutes and even after that they observed sporadic spikes in the number of sessions waiting for IO. After a couple of additional questions, it was more or less clear that they most likely hit a known problem described in AWS documentation. I am talking about “First touch penalty” on AWS. For this topic, I will use an Oracle RDS database to demonstrate the issue and how you can prepare for it. Continue reading “First Touch Penalty On AWS Cloud”