Maybe you have realized that when you deploy a compute instance in your favourite cloud environment that the “hardware” clock is set to UTC - which is the coordinated universal time. And that of course totally makes sense, since your cloud provider is operating a global business. That also isn’t a problem if you handle your times and dates in your Oracle database application properly with a timezone component. For this you can save time related data in the TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE datatype. So you can easily at any time present the value in the desired timezone value.
Recently I was playing around with the go programming language by google. Although I am not a fan of this company anymore for various reasons, the programming language is fun to work with. Especialy when it comes to development of CLI utilities it has quite some advantages and combines the ease of use like perl and the feature of producing a compiled binary like from C. Also I am a big fan of strictly typed languages.
Oracle introduced it’s container based database configuration with Oracle 12.1, which dates back to the year of 2013. So it’s ten years in the wild and the adoption process is still in progress as not all of my customers have migrated to the new architecture yet, even if is enforced with the upcoming 23c release. Although this architectural change has brought a variety of useful features that make the daily business for an DBA a lot easier, there are some problems in combination with Data Guard.
Today I learned an improvement for the way to migrate a non-container 12c database from a backup to a new container based database infrastructure in version 19 with all the glory of Oracle managed files (OMF). Of course that’s pretty simple anyways, but sometimes reading the documentation more intensely helps improving the methods you use on a daily basis. So let’s just for completeness describe the way to create a pluggable database as a clone from a database backup of a non-cdb. At first, we need to create a dummy instance and duplicate the database.
The Good Recently I discovered a critical issue when installing a new Oracle cluster for a customer on Oracle Linux systems. The hardware are shiny new blade systems and I started with the latest and greatest software components which are certified for the Oracle Enterprise Edition and Real Application Cluster. Of course the OS would be Oracle Linux 8.7 with the famous Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel which is at version 7 since this year. In April 2023 Oracle relased the release update 1 which of course brings some enhancements and fixes. Business as usual as you would think.