Oracle puts effort into selling at HEUG, which makes sense because we are all users of Oracle software. It is interesting to know what is out there, but the likelihood is we will never get to use most of it. Also, Oracle pushes cloud which I find quite depressing because I don’t know where I fit in to the new cloud paradigm.

I made notes from a couple of these sessions, which are quite short, so I will combine them here.

Is the cloud my friend?

I am concerned about the cloud. As a DBA I believe the idea is to replace most of what I do with a cloud provider. So if I want to keep working, should I work for a cloud provider, or change what I do? In the mean time I am also trying to ensure I can deliver a better service than the cloud providers using similar technologies in a way that is more responsive to the needs of my customers. So it is interesting to learn the experiences of Jo Ellen Dinucci, Associate VP, Finance and Administration - Boise State University during their journey to the cloud.

Session Celebrating 10 years of failure, because you won’t succeed from the start.

Sarah Kobus, University of Amsterdam

I thought this looked interesting, not least because I have recently realised that getting everything perfect all the time is not a realistic or desirable goal. As if to demonstrate the truth of what she was saying, her co-presenter was ill, so Sarah had to present the session alone!

How good are we at learning from failures?

Everyone encounters failure. As an illustration Sarah spoke about replacing their Student Information System. The core issue encountered was not investing enough in changing the business processes to work well with the new system.

I went to HEUG EMEA 2019 last week at the University of Amsterdam. I enjoyed it. It was good to meet some other people who work in education and use Oracle technologies. I haven’t been to HEUG before. The HEUG was smaller and I feel more friendly than the UKOUG. There were fewer exhibitors, and they seemed less desperate to sell, and happier to just have a chat about the conference and travel, which actually makes them more approachable, but I am not sure they sold any more!

This is a post which was sitting in my drafts since the start of last year, but it still seems useful to me.

It’s been a while since I have had a file that was deleted. What course to take depends on context - what do you want to achieve? In this case I wanted to remove the tablespace. I offlined all the files in the tablespace and deleted it. It is pretty easy really. The other thing I could have done is recovered the datafiles from the redo logs. Maybe I should try that another time.

SQL Tuning

As a DBA I find that people think I know about how to tune SQL. They present me with a query that looks simple, but on inspection has views on views on complex views, and has an explain plan of over 100 lines! It is difficult to know where to start, particularly when you don’t know what the SQL is supposed to be doing, or understand the structure of the data within the database.

Some Useful Ansible tricks

Including a playbook

I am working on extending my automation to do some new things. We refresh test environments from production. Previously we used to copy all the code from production back to development. Now we build the VMs from scratch, so we don’t need to do this any more, but it would be convenient to call the VM build in the middle of the refresh.

Often configuring a system involves running scripts and passing passwords as a parameter. If all goes well, this is fine, Ansible just reports the task has changed. If not, the password is logged, which is bad if the output is being sent to people who shouldn’t know it. Here are some thoughts on how to get round that.

Setup

Start with the following playbook for demonstration purposes:

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---
 -  hosts: 127.0.0.1
    connection: local
    tasks:
    - name: This works
      command: "echo This is my secret password"

    - name: This fails
      shell: "echo This is my secret password && false"

And run it: