#UKOUGAnalytics and other news

A password cracker walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Then a Beer. Then a BEER. beer. b33r. BeeR. Be3r. bEeR. bE3R. BeEr

The keynote for the #UKOUGAnalytics Modernisation Summit has been announced! Oracle’s Duncan Fitter will be providing an update on the World Bee Project, talking about how the data collected from an international network of connected smart hives will shed light on the decline of honey bee populations and the analytic technologies that are being applied to this global issue. Don’t miss it!

Also, we will be meeting up the night before at The Hereford Arms. Make sure you stop by to have a chat with us and get ready for the next day. Hoping to see you there

Blogs of the week

1. Running Oracle JET in Oracle Cloud Free Tier

Andrej Baranovskij begins his blog by writing, “OOW19 stands up from recent years OOW conferences with important announcement – Oracle Cloud Free Tier offering. This offering includes two free DB instances and two free compute VM instances. What else you could wish for the side and hobby projects? This is a strong move by Oracle and it should boost Oracle Cloud. Read more about it in Oracle Cloud Free Tier page.”

2. The definition of proof

Connor McDonald writes, “One of the pieces of advice that I often see on the ‘net is that undo space is somehow this incredibly precious thing, and as a consequence, one should always keep the amount of uncommitted changes in the database to a small size. Personally I think that is baloney…”

3. Oracle Table Prefs

Neil Chandler writes a very quick post with some SQL to show all of the Table Prefs for any specific table.

4. Free Oracle Cloud: 10. Running SQLcl and Datapump from the Compute Instance (VM) to ATP

Dimitri Gielis starts his blog by saying, “This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud. In this post, we will install and use SQLcl and Datapump from the Compute Instance (VM) connecting to our Oracle Database in the Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) Cloud.”

5. Oracle Forms 12.2.1.4.0 – New Security Handling for userid

Dirk Nachbar says, “In the latest Oracle Forms 12.2.1.4.0 Release, Oracle has implemented a new cool feature for security handling of the userid parameter. Now, with Oracle Forms 12.2.1.4.0, after you started the AdminServer of your Oracle Forms & Reports 12.2.1.4.0 environment, the value for the parameter userid will be automatically encrypted. This is managed via the new parameter forms.userid.encryption.enabled=true for $EXTRA_JAVA_PROPERTIES inside the DOMAIN_HOME/bin/setDomainEnv.sh script.”

6. Creating a training set table for machine learning in Oracle Database

Johan Louwers writes, “When building a machine learning model, you will require a learning / training set of data. To enable you to quickly create a set of training data you can make use of the SQL SAMPLE clause in a select statement. Using the SAMPLE clause you instruct the database to select from a random sample of data from the table, rather than from the entire table. This provides a very simple way of getting the random collection of records you require for training your model.”

7. Using Oracle Gold Images

Liron Amitzi says, “After OOW19 I looked into using GI gold images to upgrade a few databases at a client’s site. The client has 11 data guard environments (and they both use ASM), so using gold images would really help.”

He goes through:

Introduction to Gold Images
Installing GI
If something goes wrong
Using the Gold Image

8. Simple getTracefile

Martin Berger says, “Tracefiles are a very valuable source of information in Oracle databases. In Versions prior to 12.2 quite complicated objects (with java dependency) were required. Fortunately, in 12.2 Oracle introduced (& documented) the View V$DIAG_TRACE_FILE_CONTENTS. Unfortunately for some (only good from an internal technical perspective) reasons it does not contain the file itself, or a LOB locator, but several chunks as VARCHAR2. So it’s still worth to write some code for a simple interface to access the tracefiles.”

9. LINUX — Installing SQL Server sqlcmd and bcp command-line tools on Oracle Linux 6

Erman Arslan writes, “This blog post is about BCP (Bulk import-export utility)…It is important to know that we are using Oracle Linux 6 to execute the migration methods, I mean to execute the tools used in this migration, including the SQL Developer 19.2 itself. As you may guess, we (actually the SQL Deveoper) need a SQL Server-aware utility to bulk export the data in the first place. This tool is BCP and it can be easily installed into an Oracle Linux using the Microsoft’s yum repo prepared for RHEL 6. Note that, we also need to install the unix ODBC development libraries along with the mssql-tools package in order to make things work…”

10. OpenWorld 2019, day 4, but in fact not even then

Cameron Lackpour describes his first impressions of this year’s OpenWorld, plus some other stuff. He concludes with “There is a huge amount of features and functionality in EPM now and there’ll be even more in the near future. We Oracle EPM geeks are all, every man jack of us, about to embark on a ~~terror-filled rollercoaster ride~~ exciting and rewarding journey of learning. I’ve been wildly outside of my comfort zone for the last three years so why not continue the fun? Seriously, we shall have to apply ourself most rigorously to the training tasks ahead.”

This week on Twitter

UKOUG tweeted about UKOUG Analytics Modernisation Summit due to take place 8th October – see more details here

Connor McDonald shared the following video: