Today I got an email that began like this:

Dear Richard,

Congratulations on being selected to speak at the premier Oracle user group conference—ODTUG Kscope18. We had more than 1,000 abstracts submitted this year, making this selection a very challenging process.

The following abstract has been accepted for presentation at ODTUG Kscope18, June 10-14 in Orlando, Florida. If you submitted multiple abstracts, you will receive multiple emails with the status of each abstract.

Texas Racing Commission: Lessons Learned from Migrating to Oracle Cloud

——–

I also had another presentation that got accepted as a possible alternate:  Entity Relationship Modeling in the Age of Agile Development.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you at KScope in Orlando!

Remember to use code “insum” at checkout to get a discount off your registration.

Today is my first day as Director of Consulting Services at Insum Solutions! I’m really excited to be part of the Insum team. Insum has been a (the?)  leader in the APEX consulting services space for many years. C2 and Insum have had very similar philosophies and execution styles. I’m really looking forward to working with the new (much bigger) team.

https://www.insum.ca/insum-and-c2-consulting-unite-to-better-serve-the-american-market/

When I get some time I’ll try to change this into a series of blog posts, but for right now here’s a 141 page pdf file that covers the following in a step by step manner:

• Install and Oracle VirtualBox
• Create an Oracle Linux Server
• Install and Configure Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a Standalone Server (with special ‘Rich Soule’ start and stop scripts for using ACFS file systems)
• Install Oracle 12cR2
• Create a Multitenant Database
• Install and Configure Apache/Tomcat/ORDS
• Install and Configure Oracle Application Express

You can find the pdf here: Using the Oracle Cloud (or Oracle VirtualBox) to build a DBA practice environment.

It’s 15 days early (Oracle Support had said that it would be here on Feb 15th) which means that I’ll be able to start on my ODTUG presentation 15 days earlier than I thought.

Go to http://eDelivery.oracle.com to get the latest and greatest Oracle Database.

Happy DBAing!

The installation documentation for Oracle APEX 5.1 has the following code in it for enabling network access from the database in a pre-12c database:

DECLARE
  ACL_PATH  VARCHAR2(4000);
BEGIN
  -- Look for the ACL currently assigned to '*' and give apex_050100
  -- the "connect" privilege if apex_050100 does not have the privilege yet.
 
  SELECT ACL INTO ACL_PATH FROM DBA_NETWORK_ACLS
   WHERE HOST = '*' AND LOWER_PORT IS NULL AND UPPER_PORT IS NULL;
 
  IF DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.CHECK_PRIVILEGE(ACL_PATH, 'apex_050100',
     'connect') IS NULL THEN
      DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.ADD_PRIVILEGE(ACL_PATH,
     'apex_050100', TRUE, 'connect');
  END IF;
 
EXCEPTION
  -- When no ACL has been assigned to '*'.
  WHEN NO_DATA_FOUND THEN
  DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.CREATE_ACL('power_users.xml',
    'ACL that lets power users to connect to everywhere',
    'apex_050100', TRUE, 'connect');
  DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.ASSIGN_ACL('power_users.xml','*');
END;
/
COMMIT;

You’ll notice that the username in the above is ‘apex_050100’. If you run the above code you’ll get the following:

01435. 00000 -  "user does not exist"
*Cause:    
*Action:

Changing each instance of ‘apex_050100’ to ‘APEX_050100’ will address the error and you’ll be able to run the code.

Interestingly enough the new 12c APIs are apparently doing an UPPER on the passed in username because the following code works just fine:

BEGIN
    DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.APPEND_HOST_ACE(
        host => '*',
        ace => xs$ace_type(privilege_list => xs$name_list('connect'),
                           principal_name => 'apex_050100',
                           principal_type => xs_acl.ptype_db));
END;
/

I’ve logged a bug request with Oracle Support (of course).

Happy APEXing!

While upgrading a server to ORDS 3.0.9 (from ORDS 3.0.5) and APEX 5.1 I noticed the following output during the ORDS upgrade…

$ java -jar ords.war install advanced

[snip...]
Jan 05, 2017 3:59:43 PM  
 INFO: Updated configurations: defaults, apex, apex_pu, apex_al, apex_rt
 Upgrading Oracle REST Data Services schema 3.0.5.124.10.54 to version 3.0.9.348.07.16
 ... Log file written to /home/apache/ords_upgrade_2017-01-05_155943_00336.log
 Upgrading ORDS schema to 3.0.6
 Completed upgrade for Oracle REST Data Services version 3.0.9.348.07.16.
Elapsed time: 00:00:16.437 

You might notice that the output has “Upgrading ORDS schema to 3.0.6” even though the version of ORDS is 3.0.9.

Of course the following query does return the right value and ORDS is the correct version:

select * from ords_metadata.ords_version;

VERSION                      
------------------------------
3.0.9.348.07.16

It looks like we are getting even closer to an Apex 5.1 release as apex.oracle.com just got upgraded to 5.1. Application Express 5.1 has a number of really nice features in it.

A simplified form wizard, new Theming and the Interactive Grid are some of the new 5.1 features. We are all really looking forward to the release of Apex 5.1.

You can test these features out at https://apex.oracle.com/ where you can get a free account to play with.

If you’ve run into the catconInit: database is not open on the default instance error and didn’t immediately understand what was going on, then this post is for you.

It’s not that common of an error as you have to be in a very specific configuration to see it: You need to be using either Oracle RAC or RAC One Node and you also have to be using the Oracle Multitenant option and you have to have your ORACLE_SID environment variable set to something other than the name of the instance where you are running your command.

catcon.pl is a Perl program that takes a few arguments including the name of a SQL (or PL/SQL) script and then it runs that code in the root container and each of the online pluggable containers (which includes PDB$SEED even though PDB$SEED isn’t in read/write mode).

For example, if you attempt to remove the version of APEX that is shipped with the 12c database (APEX 4.x) from the root and pluggable containers (see this from post by Mike Dietrich on why you should do that) then you’ll need to use the apxremov_con.sql script which is a wrapper for catcon.pl. If your environment isn’t set correctly, then you’ll run into the above issue.

Let’s talk a bit about the environment.

When you create a RAC database then Oracle adds an entry into your /etc/oratab (or /var/opt/oratab if you happen to be on Solaris) that has your database name in it.I’m not sure what happens on Windows as I don’t generally run Oracle Databases on Windows servers.

If you created a two node RAC cluster with a database named orcl, you’d have the following: A database on shared storage named orcl (the database in this case referring to the actual data files and other files), and then two instances (instances being the background processes and memory structures running on each node), each running on a different node. By default those instances would be named orcl_1 and orcl_2.

The catconInit: database is not open on the default instance error happens when the above default configuration gets in the way…

When using the oraenv (on Linux/Unix with bash as your shell) or coraenv (if you are using csh) script you get prompted for an ORACLE_SID. The value you supply is looked up in the /etc/oratab file and is used to set all kinds of environment variables. If the oraenv script can’t find an entry in the /etc/oratab file then you are also prompted for an ORACLE_HOME. An example /etc/oratab entry is below:

prodcon:/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1:N             # line added by Agent

So now you attempt to run your apxremov_con.sql script…

[oracle@prododa0 ~]$ . oraenv
 ORACLE_SID = [oracle] ? prodcon
 The Oracle base has been set to /u01/app/oracle
 [oracle@prododa0 ~]$ cd $ORACLE_HOME/apex
 [oracle@prododa0 apex]$ sqlplus sys@prodcon as sysdba
 SQL*Plus: Release 12.1.0.2.0 Production on Wed Jun 22 15:31:25 2016
 Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
 Enter password:
 Connected to:
 Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
 With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, OLAP, Advanced Analytics
 and Real Application Testing options
 
 SQL> @apxremov_con.sql
 PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
 Performing installation in multitenant container database in the background.
 The installation progress is spooled into apxremov*_con*.log files.
 Please wait...
 catcon: ALL catcon-related output will be written to apxremov1_con_catcon_88654.lst
 catcon: See apxremov1_con*.log files for output generated by scripts
 catcon: See apxremov1_con_*.lst files for spool files, if any
 catconInit: database is not open on the default instance
 Unexpected error encountered in catconInit; exiting

The issue is that catcon.pl requires your ORACLE_SID to be set not to the database name as we did above, but instead to the instance name. You can use either a bequeath connection (sqlplus / as sysdba) or an Oracle Net connection (sqlplus sys@prodcon as sysdba) as long as your ORACLE_SID is set correctly for the node you are running the command on.

[oracle@prododa0 apex]$ . oraenv
 ORACLE_SID = [prodcon] ?
 The Oracle base remains unchanged with value /u01/app/oracle
 [oracle@prododa0 apex]$ echo $ORACLE_HOME
 /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1
 [oracle@prododa0 apex]$ . oraenv
 ORACLE_SID = [prodcon] ? prodcon_1
 ORACLE_HOME = [/home/oracle] ? /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1
 The Oracle base remains unchanged with value /u01/app/oracle
 [oracle@prododa0 apex]$ sqlplus sys@prodcon as sysdba
 SQL*Plus: Release 12.1.0.2.0 Production on Tue Jul 19 12:25:00 2016
 Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
 Enter password:
 Connected to:
 Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
 With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, OLAP, Advanced Analytics
 and Real Application Testing options
 SYS@prodcon AS SYSDBA> @apxremov_con.sql
 PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
 Performing installation in multitenant container database in the background.
 The installation progress is spooled into apxremov*_con*.log files.
 Please wait...
 catcon: ALL catcon-related output will be written to apxremov1_con_catcon_5772.lst
 catcon: See apxremov1_con*.log files for output generated by scripts
 catcon: See apxremov1_con_*.lst files for spool files, if any
 catcon.pl: completed successfully
 catcon: ALL catcon-related output will be written to apxremov2_con_catcon_6339.lst
 catcon: See apxremov2_con*.log files for output generated by scripts
 catcon: See apxremov2_con_*.lst files for spool files, if any
 catcon.pl: completed successfully
 Installation completed. Log files for each container can be found in:
 apxremov*_con*.log
 You can quickly scan for ORA errors or compilation errors by using a utility like grep:
 grep ORA- *.log
 grep PLS- *.log
 SYS@prodcon AS SYSDBA>

The Oracle documentation on catcon.pl isn’t exactly clear that you can run into this issue. I’ve logged a doc bug against the documentation so hopefully this will be clearer in the future.