All-in-one DevOps VM

All-in-one DevOps VM

The Ultimate DevOps Sandbox . “Tired of juggling multiple VMs for your DevOps stack? Get it all in one place with the ultimate DevOps VM—just one command, zero hassle.” Intro This idea’s been chilling in my mind for ages while I was playing around with Vagrant. I’ve lost count of the number of cool builds I’ve tried out ... Read more

How to Survive Pearson Vue exam glitch nightmare

How to Survive Pearson Vue exam glitch nightmare

Intro Recently, I passed the AWS SAA certification, and while sharing your achievement on socials after long months of preparation and grind can be gratifying, some Pearson Vue test takers, didn’t have the same smooth experience, for unexpected challenges due to OnVue software glitches. In this short post, I’ll take you through the surreal blunders of my ... Read more

Tech Content creator toolkit: the cheat sheet

Tech Content creator toolkit: the cheat sheet

Intro Some of you are probably at a stage where daily work isn’t enough, and interacting with the tech community is the fulfilling mission you’ve been waiting for. But in order to do so, you need to level up your game. Whether your goal is to be a blogger, speaker, podcaster, or social media maverick, you ... Read more

OCI FortiGate HA Cluster – Reference Architecture: Code review & Fixes

OCI FortiGate HA Cluster – Reference Architecture: Code review & Fixes

Intro OCI Quick Start repositories on GitHub are collections of Terraform scripts and configurations provided by Oracle. These repositories are designed to help organizations quickly deploy common infrastructure setups on the OCI Platform. Each Quick Start focuses on a specific use case or workload, simplifying the process of provisioning on OCI using Terraform—a sort of IaC-based ... Read more

Cloud Showdown: Bare Metal vs. VMs in OCI – Pros & Cons

Cloud Showdown: Bare Metal vs. VMs in OCI – Pros & Cons

Intro The migration journey to the cloud for a business comes in different shapes and colors. Today, we’ll explore a quick comparison between Bare metal and VM platforms, which are two IaaS compute options available in Oracle Cloud infrastructure. Although specific to OCI, you might find similar benefits and trade-offs in other Cloud platforms. In this short ... Read more

Farewell to ClickOps: OCI CLI seamless Data Guard Replication for ExaC@C

Farewell to ClickOps: OCI CLI seamless Data Guard Replication for ExaC@C

Intro Since the very beginning, everyone got introduced to  Cloud services through the console as it’s very quick. But the cloud CLI tooling provides a stronger, yet user-friendly way to automate tasks, often covering features not even available in the console. Moreover, DBAs often assume that the CLI is primarily designed for managing compute-based services, overlooking ... Read more

Deploy multilevel OCI sub-compartments with terraform (using local module)

Deploy multilevel OCI sub-compartments with terraform (using local module)

  IntroIn my previous blogpost, we explored the challenges with relying on terraform registry modules for code sanity checks. Additionally, we reviewed OCI iam-compartment module and I shared my revised version in my Github. Today, we'll demonstrate how to deploy multi-level OCI compartments using my local module (iam-compartment), which you can easily clone from my GitHub ... Read more

What’s OIDC and why should you use it asap in your GitHub pipeline (keyless)

What’s OIDC and why should you use it asap in your GitHub pipeline (keyless)

Table of contentsPopular Authentications to Cloud (Why is it wrong?)OAuth OriginsOAuth 2.0 terminologyOAuth 2.0 workflowWhat is OIDC? OIDC .vs OAuth 2.0OIDC Authentication flowOIDC in GitHub ActionsMultiCloud keyless access examples (Azure/ AWS/ GCP)Hackers Paradise !                        -- “ 10 million credentials from GitHub were accessible in 2022 alone.” --This is the shocking truth exposed in a ... Read more

Azure VM Selection Made Easy: A Script Identifying Best Constrained CPU VMs for High Memory/ Low CPU Workload

Azure VM Selection Made Easy: A Script Identifying Best Constrained CPU VMs for High Memory/ Low CPU Workload

                                         IntroAre you struggling to find the most Cost-Effective Azure VMs for Database Workloads or any high memory low CPU workload? Look no further! In this blog post, we’ll introduce the concept of Azure constrained CPU along with cases where az cli displays misleading info, and finally a script that makes it easy to identify ... Read more

Terraform live cost estimate using infracost free plugin

Terraform live cost estimate using infracost free plugin

IntroThe cloud offers unlimited scalability at lower costs with the available resources. Companies enable their engineering teams to launch infrastructure as and when needed. However, since costs aren't shown to engineers before Cloud resources are deployed, the real cost implications are unknown. That causes higher than expected costs and ballooning budgets over time, which is ... Read more

ZDM installation error in Oracle Linux 8 (Failed to initialize MySQL) & how to fix it

ZDM installation error in Oracle Linux 8 (Failed to initialize MySQL) & how to fix it

Intro Zero downtime migration (ZDM) is one of the best option available to migrate your Oracle database to Oracle Cloud. Automation and simplicity are among its strong benefits beside zero downtime feature. Although migrating in OCI is the classic use case(see Oracle migration & integration specialist certification), I had the chance to try a different scenario ... Read more

Windows commands line cheat sheet for DBAs

Windows commands line cheat sheet for DBAs

IntroWe all know Windows is the preferred platform for Oracle DBAs !! I hear that every day :D. All right, maybe not so much ;). But Jokes aside, when your client has the majority of his DB workload running on windows, it’s hard to dodge the job. It becomes even more challenging to switch to ... Read more

Compare OCI, AWS, Azure, GCP application services

Compare OCI, AWS, Azure, GCP application services

Intro Common trend for cloud providers is to compare their services/offers with AWS (even AWS itself does it when releasing new features). But it seems that the top 3 reached a sort of agreement where they only acknowledge their respective direct competition & dismiss any player outside this oligopoly. Oracle Cloud or AliCloud being more than ... Read more

RMAN, INCARNATIONS, and ME part II: Recovery ignoring backups            /   ORA-19563: datafile copy header validation failed for file

RMAN, INCARNATIONS, and ME part II: Recovery ignoring backups / ORA-19563: datafile copy header validation failed for file

Intro In an ideal world, I believe, every backup script should be matched by 2 recovery scenarios. As this swiss OUC figure reminds us, having a backup that works means nothing without a tested restore and recovery. Today I’ll try to depict the don’t do’s after an recovery of a controlfile with open resetlogs using RMAN. ... Read more

19c PDB Refreshable clones

19c PDB Refreshable clones

Intro Beside Long term release benefits, upgrading to a multitenant 19c Database will allow to completely ease the way test environments are refreshed from production servers. Say Goodbye to complex & lengthy RMAN duplicate scripts and hello to remote cloning. Even better with refreshable clones, production data is now automatically updated. Many blogs were written about ... Read more

Create a local Windows10 VPN bastion using a vagrant box

Create a local Windows10 VPN bastion using a vagrant box

IntroThere are many examples online on how to create a linux vagrant box including mine. But not so much around windows boxes. The easiest way?  just shop around in Vagrant Cloud, identify a windows box, and spin it using vagrant up. That’s exactly what I did but I faced a problem after the trial period expired ... Read more

Google SDK (CLI for GCP) installation and few CLI examples

Google SDK (CLI for GCP) installation and few CLI examples

IntroGoogle as most of the cloud providers today, offers a simple Cloud shell solution with all required tools to connect to their platform securely using APIs. However, If you still want to have it in your laptop along with other development tools, you can always install Google Cloud SDK (especially if it’s for educational purpose). Cloud ... Read more

GCP Short lab: launch an instance, Startup script & test logging via CloudShell

GCP Short lab: launch an instance, Startup script & test logging via CloudShell

                                         Intro GCP Cloud Shell not only allows to execute and automate tasks around your Cloud resources, but It can help you understand what happens behind the scene when a vm is provisioned for example. That’s also a good way to prepare for the GCP Cloud engineer certification. Although it normally takes a subscription to ACloudGuru ... Read more

GCP Associate Cloud engineer certification takeaways

GCP Associate Cloud engineer certification takeaways

Intro I have been asked lately to share some prep tips after I passed the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Certification. Although there are tons of articles online describing the exam content and many resource materials to help prepare for the exam, I decided to share my thoughts around the preparation journey along with my feedback on the ... Read more

Interview With Oracle FPP head Ludovico Caldara

Interview With Oracle FPP head Ludovico Caldara

I want to thank Ludovico Caldara [FPP & Cloud MAA Product Manager @Oracle] for accepting the publication of this interview which is based on a conversation we had some time ago. It is mainly focused on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (FPP) “FUNDAMENTALS”, but I hope this could help the community to glean a ... Read more

Convert local listeners to Oracle Grid managed listeners

Convert local listeners to Oracle Grid managed listeners

Intro One of the advantages of Oracle grid Infrastructure is to restart all managed resources (databases, asm, listeners,…etc)  automatically whenever you (re)start the cluster service (crs) or reboot the whole server.I recently had to patch an oda where the client still had few listeners (with non default ports) managed locally and not through grid. This means ... Read more

Add SCAN VIPs to Oracle RAC with zero “listener” downtime

Add SCAN VIPs to Oracle RAC with zero “listener” downtime

Intro Infrastructure teams are usually more keen to maintain a network stability rather than altering their existing configuration every other day.This means that once the application and database hosts are provisioned and running, the DBA won't witness a topology change unless a migration of the servers/applications are in the pipes. But for highly available environment like ... Read more

Deploy a webserver vm using Azure CLI and bash scripts (Linux/windows)

Deploy a webserver vm using Azure CLI and bash scripts (Linux/windows)

                                         Intro Azure cli was another tool I had to try right after passing Az-900 azure certification, because what are certifications for if it’s not to give a little itching to get your hands a little dirty. Thus, az-cli became my third victim after oci-cli and aws-cli. As in my previous cli tutorials, the aim is to ... Read more

Azure CLI installation and few CLI examples

Azure CLI installation and few CLI examples

Today we will see how easy Microsoft has made it to install azure CLI which is a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that manages azure Cloud resources. In previous posts I explored the installation for the CLI software of both Oracle and AWS, I have to say that Azure CLI is by far the simplest ... Read more

Terraform tricks : How to mimic nested variable substitution using locals

Terraform tricks : How to mimic nested variable substitution using locals

Intro                         “Developer’s constant urge to use Terraform like a programming language :)”My impression after enjoying my first terraform applys is that it's kind of rigid, though when someone says Immutable and declarative in the same sentence, you should definitely get that it's not procedural by design. Therefore,  you can’t expect a bash shell script programmability. ... Read more

AWS CLI installation in 10 minutes

AWS CLI installation in 10 minutes

Almost every Cloud provider has a Command Line Interface (CLI) which is a unified tool to manage cloud resources. In previous post I described how to configure Oracle Cloud infrastructure CLI. This time my focus is its AWS equivalent as I intend to explore different ways of provisioning instances in all major Cloud shops (OCI,AWS,Azure,GCP),  ... Read more

AHF Cheatsheet

AHF Cheatsheet

Do You Speak AHF ?Oracle Autonomous Health Framework (AHF) presents the next generation of All in one solution that includes tools which work together autonomously 24x7 to keep database systems healthy and running. It does so while minimizing human reaction time using existing components like orachk, TFA and many more. I started digging about this ... Read more

launch an oci instance with oci-cli in 10 minutes

launch an oci instance with oci-cli in 10 minutes

IntroCatchy title I give you that, but there is more in this article than its title. Besides getting familiar with OCI-ClI, this lab will introduce another way to work with OCI API requests as described in the OCI Operations Associate exam(1Z0-1067) training. The tutorial will not only walk you through the required steps to have an ... Read more

Install OCI-CLI in 5 minutes

Install OCI-CLI in 5 minutes

I recently had a weekly digest from medium website and noticed a blog post talking about configuring OCI in 5 minute. The funny thing is that you had to pay a subscription to read about what Oracle documented for free. I don’t know how SEO works but I thought I would use the same title ... Read more

GoldenGate : setup Bi-Directional Replication in Multitenant environment (PDBs)

GoldenGate : setup Bi-Directional Replication in Multitenant environment (PDBs)

Intro GoldenGate replication solution allows you to capture, replicate, filter, transform, and deliver real time transactional data across Oracle or heterogeneous environments. Goldengate 12c features along with Oracle multitenant architecture introduced some changes to the way replication works (see Fig-1). Another interesting fact is that few of Oracle Streams features have now found their way into ... Read more

Vagrant: Create a Red Hat 8 base box packaged for Oracle 19c (Vbox)

Vagrant: Create a Red Hat 8 base box packaged for Oracle 19c (Vbox)

Intro Vagrant is an opensource tool for working with virtual environments (VirtualBox,HyperV,Vmware..etc). It provides a simple command-line client for managing these environments, using a text-file (VagrantFile) defining the attributes of each environment.   To know more about vagrant you can try their getting started guide or consult the Vagrant official documentation.Vagrant cloud already offers a plethora ... Read more

MAA setup– Creating Single instance Physical Standby for RAC Primary – 12c

MAA setup– Creating Single instance Physical Standby for RAC Primary – 12c

Introduction:Oracle provides many options for preventing downtime and data loss, all of which make up the Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA). The Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture offers a set of standard reference architectures--Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Solutions-- that comply with Customer Business Objectives. With multiple instances, the RAC system gives a transparent HA and scalability ... Read more

Enjoy and experiment RAC Features

Enjoy and experiment RAC Features

Introduction: The goal of this section is to explore some of the Oracle Clusterware feaures as node fencing, callouts, as well as working with services and Policy managed servers . To know more about the cluster lab used in this article  please have a look on my previous RACattack on Redhat 7 blog post  >> ... Read more

Deploying Oracle active Data Guard 12c on Windows servers Part III (FAST START FAILOVER)

Deploying Oracle active Data Guard 12c on Windows servers Part III (FAST START FAILOVER)

7. FAST START FAILOVER7.1 CONFIGURATION FAST START FAILOVERFast start failover allows Data Guard to automatically failover to a previously selected standby database without human intervention. Data Guard monitors the status of the configuration continuously and triggers a failover if necessary.This architecture makes the fast-start failover ideal for high availability and disaster recovery.» Prerequisites to enable ... Read more

Restore standard naming of network interfaces on Red Hat enterprise linux 7

Restore standard naming of network interfaces on Red Hat enterprise linux 7

Disabling consistent network device naming To disable The consistent network device naming feature and create your own manual ma,ing scheme ,for example eth0,internet0 or lan0. Follow the below steps so that all network device names will be eth followed by an integer. Log in as root, or as a user with superuser privileges. Edit the GRUB 2 general settings file. Create a backup copy ... Read more

Deploying Oracle RAC Database 12c Lab on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with Virtual Box -racattack Repack

Deploying Oracle RAC Database 12c Lab on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with Virtual Box -racattack Repack

Introduction: This document provides a step-by-step deployment procedure with some of best practices to install and configure an Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)* with Oracle ASM on Linux RedHat Entreprise 7 virtual machines (Virtualbox). Most of it is inspired by the RACAttack project  that was written collaboratively by many authors all ... Read more

70-462 Training Kit Setup Preparation: Hyper-V – SQL server 2012 on Windows server 2012 R2 – Part I

70-462 Training Kit Setup Preparation: Hyper-V – SQL server 2012 on Windows server 2012 R2 – Part I

Introduction: Training Kit (Exam 70-462): Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases, states that 6 machines are needed in order to complete the lessons and exercises. Though I consider it an overkill for a database administration certification (especially when one only needs 3 machines to try out all or most of Oracle High availability features RAC /DATA ... Read more