Earlier today I was given a challenge by my colleagues. Recently Oracle released the Autonomous Data Warehouse and we have a lot of excitement from customers, partners and internal folk alike. This excitement is driving a lot of innovation right now, but that also brings some challenges. The last thing we want is the Marketing team to mess with Finance resources. How do we make sure different teams don’t step on each other’s toes?
Category: ADWC
Teaching a trick to easily import Excel Data into Oracle Autonomous Database (ADW and ATP)
The other day my boss shared with me a nice trick that I found it very useful and has simplified my life a lot, when creating demos or quick prototypes. For this reason and knowing how many people are quickly switching into using Oracle Autonomous Database (ADW or ATP), I thought it would be a good idea to be shared as a quick reference.
The trick consists in using SQL Developer to easily import Data from Excel spreadsheets, directly into Oracle Autonomous DB (ADW or ATP). This also opens up a nice wizard that helps create and configure new database tables to be created and then used to import the data. How cool is that?
This complements a previous article that explains how to provision and get started with Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database. Also, we have published articles to get started with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.
Remember, the difference is simple:
Teaching How to get Microservices to Consume Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database (ATP)
A few days ago, we published an article that shows how to provision and connect to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database (ATP). Based on this, we got multiple requests to also demonstrate how to extend the connection to the Autonomous DB, not only from SQL Developer, but also from polyglot microservices.
In this blog, we are going to take a step forward and create a simple “Hello World” NodeJS application that exposes some REST APIs that push and pull data using an Oracle Autonomous DB. The idea is to give you all knowledge required, to be start building your own microservices, consuming data from Autonomous DB.
Connect Dockerised Instant Client to Autonomous Data Warehouse
With all the recent exciting releases of Oracle Autonomous PaaS Services, I wanted to explore some of the client connectivity options to work against the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW).
In my cloud subscription I provisioned an instance of ADW which took less than two minutes from start to finish – terrific, now I am ready to leverage the functionality. If you want to know the steps to provision an ADW instance check out this blog post – https://redthunder.blog/2018/07/02/teaching-how-to-get-started-with-oracle-autonomous-data-warehouse-cloud-service/
Obviously an empty data warehouse isn’t particularly useful so one of the first things I wanted to do was to connect a SQL client to the ADW instance so that I can load some data. Initially I used Oracle SQLDeveloper to load data into my ADW instance. I had staged my Excel data files into an Oracle Cloud Object Storage container and then referenced them in my SQL code as External Tables. Carlos has already blogged the steps required for this in https://redthunder.blog/2018/07/02/teaching-how-to-get-started-with-oracle-autonomous-data-warehouse-cloud-service/ . If you follow the steps you will quickly get your ADW instance populated with your data. In fact for the demo scenario my ADW instance was now populated with some data (approx. 1 Million rows of Sales data and associated related dimensions (Product, Customers etc).
My next step (and the subject of this blog post) was to use the Oracle Instant Client in order to query the loaded data. Of course I could easily have viewed the data inside SQLDeveloper but I wanted to try some other approaches. Often in Proof of Concepts there is a need to quickly spin up a tool to create, retrieve, update and delete data. Anyone who has used the Oracle Database would be familiar with the SQL*Plus client which is included as part of the Oracle Instant Client. For those who are not familiar with Oracle Instant client, the Oracle website describes it as follows,
“Free, light-weight, and easily installed Oracle Database tools, libraries and SDKs for building and connecting applications to an Oracle Database instance. Oracle Instant Client enables applications to connect to a local or remote Oracle Database for development and production deployment. The Instant Client libraries provide the necessary network connectivity, as well as basic and high end data features, to make full use of Oracle Database. It underlies the Oracle APIs of popular languages and environments including Node.js, Python and PHP, as well as providing access for OCI, OCCI, JDBC, ODBC and Pro*C applications. Tools included in Instant Client, such as SQL*Plus and Oracle Data Pump, provide quick and convenient data access.”
I used a Vagrant-Box / VirtualBox to avoid having to install development tools such as the Oracle Instant Client directly on my laptop operating system. I found an existing vagrant box that provided me with an Oracle Linux base that also included Docker. This vagrant-box image allowed me to quickly spin up a base environment which in turn allowed me to focus on steps to run the Oracle Instant Client inside a Docker container inside the Virtual Box environment (sounds like a cheesecake recipe – lots of layers). The Dockerfile I used was based on the Oracle Instant Client forked from the official Oracle DockerImages project with some modifications for specifics around connecting to an Oracle Data Warehouse Instance. Continue reading “Connect Dockerised Instant Client to Autonomous Data Warehouse”
Teaching How to Get Started with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service
Data Warehouses have been around for a long time and they bring multiple benefits, but these also come at a cost. Some of the associated challenges that are easily identified when talking about traditional Data Warehouses include:
- Complexity and Expensive
- Inability to manage data and user growth
- Hard to deploy and maintain
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse aims at easing these challenges with the ability to:
- Provision a data warehouse in as little as 15 seconds.
- Full automation of management of the Data Warehouse
- Instant scaling with zero-downtime
- Automated Tuning
- Migration tools, e.g. Redshift
In this blog, let’s show can easily we can provision a new Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, load data into it and run some data visualization on top.
Continue reading “Teaching How to Get Started with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service”
Your Place or Ours
Sometimes you just want to build a local environment on your own equipment simply because it’s quick and easy. But you soon realise that other people need access and resources get a bit tight (memory, CPU, etc). That’s when it makes sense to move it from your place into the cloud.
Just recently I realised how useful Oracle Virtual Box’s new export feature is for migrating local VMs into Oracle Public Cloud Infrastructure – Compute Classic. Oracle Virtual Box’s new export formats give me the ability to easily migrate Images to the Oracle Public Cloud where I can scale my environments as required.
Earlier this week I was building a new Oracle Identity and Access Management development environment on my laptop. This worked well from an initial build and configure perspective but there comes a time when I need to make this environment available to my Developers, Testers and other stakeholders. Running this image continuously on my laptop quickly becomes impractical even for development teams.
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