Skip to main content

First steps using the Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service

The Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service was announced at Oracle Open World 2016. This service looks like an excellent use case for Oracle Database development purposes as well as setting up a test environment. And even for small to medium sized production situations it looks very promising as you can see in the table below. Especially the cheapest option offers a lot of bang for your bucks.
But alas, this service was not as widely available as I expected. The first months it was US-only and you could only figure out by ordering the service and then you would find out on the last page that you should "contact your Oracle sales rep". I sincerely doubt whether he or she could provide you with that service, so I just waited until it would be more generally available.
And since a few weeks the Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service is also available in Europe - I don't know about other parts of the world. A missed chance though that Oracle didn't announce that properly. You can only find out by trial-and-error. And to be clear, your data will still reside on US soil...

After entering my credit card number I made my purchase irreversible and I immediately received an order confirmation. As I expected these cloud things go very fast I started waiting for the mail that would say that my service was ready. Not on that same day. Not on the next day. But two days later, I finally received my "Welcome to Oracle Cloud" email. If any webshop that ships physical items would move that slow, they would be out of business pretty soon. 
But now I was ready to go! First I had to create my "service instance". No clue what Oracle did the last two days, but effectively I only had access to a console where I could create such an instance. Why doesn't Oracle create that instance immediately? Because in the end what I ordered was a service instance - not the option to create one...

Nevertheless, with a few clicks I had requested my instance as seen in the screen below (notice the little missing icons / images on the upper left and right buttons...).
The only thing that had to be done was firing up a 20Gb Pluggable Database (PDB). On my VM that would take a few minutes. So on an Exadata beast ... a minute or maybe two?

Alas, no. For some reason it took 4 (four!) full days. All those days I logged in to see whether there was any progress and all I saw was:
After the Oracle internal issues were solved - the PDB was created super fast, but the registration process failed somewhere - I was finally up and running. 

It took a while, but I hope it was worth waiting for ....

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one: then you disable the " Escape special characters " property and the result is an updatable multirecord form. That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03. But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows. So for

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good old Employ

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

 If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department".  And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function