Thoughts on Oracle Database@Azure

This will NOT be a technical walkthrough on Oracle Database@Azure but rather my opinions and thoughts on how it will shape the Oracle workload destinations when migrating out from on-premises. Once I get few technical implementations under my belt, I’ll also write some more details on how I see it works and how we need…

OCI Vulnerability Scanning Setup

Many times when you work for someone, they already have their own vulnerability scanning throughout the organization. What usually happens is that onboarding to that tooling might take time, that’s why I initially started to look on OCI Vulnerability Scanning Service – to have something scanning your servers or images from day 1! Or could…

OCI IP Address Insights

Recently OCI announced small but VERY useful service, IP Address Insights. Why this matters? I’ve run into multiple issues where we have VCNs and subnets deployed and don’t have any visibility on how many IP addresses are currently allocated on given VCN/subnet and who’s also reserving those. Not too long ago, someone reached out to…

OCI Network Firewall – Real World problems

I recently hit an issue with OCI Network Firewall that we had configured with NAT GW (see previous posts on it). We expected only to use it for egress traffic from OCI to public internet from our private compute VMs but a new requirement came which required to access some privately exposed services on OCI,…

Getting VCN Flow Logs to Streaming

Many times after you’ve enabled the VCN Flow Logs (or any logs what so ever!) there will be a requirement to get those logs out to some other system. VCN Flow Logs is one, I’ve also configured Cloud Guard logs/alerts in similar way that I will show here. Key point is to get the logs…

Helping to troubleshoot with OCI VCN Flow Logs

I’m a huge fan of using tools available to help troubleshoot any issues there are. Luckily OCI has many free tools available such as Network Path Analyzer, which I’ve touched in the past. This time we’re going to look on VCN Flow Logs, I think as a starting point we should be looking on enabling…

OCI ExaCS Database Upgrade Rollback

Recently I was testing OCI database upgrade from 12c to 19c and ran into an issue I wanted to fix. I was doing this via dbaascli (on Exadata) and the upgrade hit Bug 34455245 – db12c upgrade to 19c fails with ORA-600 [kxhfmgetextent.1] (Doc ID 34455245.8). I tried few things as with dbaascli you can…