ociweekly2
Hey [subscriber:firstname | default:subscriber],
You're reading issue #100 of the OCI Newsletter! It's been almost three years since I started so thanks for being part of the ride. :)

I've decided to switch publishing day to Monday which fits better on my current schedule, so expect to read this from now on fresh on early morning Monday!
I promised to release my top 5 features from last year on the previous newsletter, still working on that.. hopefully have it out next week.
Couple new Regions in the last month, Stockholm (go Sweden!) and Johannesburg. More to come this year.

What's new?
You can scale RECO and DATA separately on VM DBCS instances now! Previously if you needed large RECO the only way to do this.. was to pump up the whole storage which might have caused you to have huge DATA partition just for..nothing!

This will help on several different use cases when you plan your DBCS usage.
Another big one, last year we saw block volume cross region replication but now this has been extended to block volume groups. No more scripting!
Official announcement here.
Exadata Cloud Service database with Data Guard can now be upgraded without first removing the DG association. Another win when you use standard tooling which makes operational tasks easier.
Visual Builder is now available! You can use it to develop and manage mobile and web applications. Haven't tried this one so you have to do some research to see how it works!
Exadata Cloud Service supports now PDB (Pluggable Database) management through Console and APIs. Another feature helping operations.

I've been saying for long time that while OCI has lot of great functionality it's been missing some basic features for operations which still requires lot of manual work. These are really good improvements for DBAs.
VM and BM DBCS now let's you choose your Data Guard type between Active Data Guard and "regular".
Autonomous Database Dedicated (ADB-D) now does automatic failover with fast-start failover to standby if it detects an outage.

I would love to see something around DNS for failovers as well for any database system. How are you handling those as of today? One option is always to have custom DNS on top of Scan DNS which is used for connectivity.
Standard3 Intel-based shapes are available! Similar as E3.Flex shapes you can customize these for your liking.

Blogs & News
Julian has picked up few new Autonomous DB features, CS_SESSION package and DB_NOTIFICATION view.
He also writes on moving Autonomous Database across Regions. If you're running Autonomous Database for production workload, what's your strategy with cloning? Do you run your non-prod workloads in same Region as PROD just to ease the cloning?
Lucas has few posts on OCI Go SDK. First post is about authenticating with instance principals. Funny, I had same struggle earlier where I had hard time finding out how to do the authentication but seems it's pretty straightforward!
Second post is about 0.
Sinan writes about multicloud with OCI, I think there are really good points in this article.
How to migrate MySQL database to Autonomous Database (mainly with SQL Developer). Would be nice to see deep dive on how you migrate large MySQL DB and what options there are?
Here's some details on the improvements made lately for OCI site-to-site VPNs.

Remember


Contact me via Twitter @svilmune or just send an email if you have any ideas, comments or if you see I'm missing some good source for the weekly news.

I'm not in partnership with Oracle in any way so all opinions are my personal views and should not be taken as an official statement from Oracle.
You can unsubscribe at any time using the link below if you feel this newsletter is not for you.
Have an awesome day, thanks for reading!
Simo
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