The frenetic pace of application development in modern IT organizations means it’s not unusual to demand an application be built with minimal requirements gathering – literally, from a napkin-based sketch – to a working first draft of the app within extremely short time frames – even a weekend! – with production deployment to follow just a few days later. This article – the second in this ongoing series – focuses on how easy it is to leverage Oracle APEX to build the first of several components of a sufficiently-robust application for election canvassers to identify, classify, and inform voters in a huge northwest suburban Chicago voting district.

Hear from the SELECT Editors about what's on the top of their DBA wishlist for 2019.

This article explains how to configure Oracle API Gateway as a cluster on Solaris SPARC. The software can be download from the Oracle Technology Network. Before installing the API Gateway, you need to consider which components you require. Some components — for example, API Gateway Analytics — have additional requirements, such as a database. There are different components that could be installed, too, such as Policy Studio. There is not much documentation that discusses how to configure the Cluster for this product, so I chose to write one and be the first. The version of the API Gateway used in this article is Release 11.1.2.4.0, which is the latest at the time of writing.

This article, part one of a three-part series, explores a DBAs journey to APEX.

The frenetic pace of application development in modern IT organizations means it’s not unusual to demand an application be built with minimal requirement gathering—literally, from a napkin-based sketch—to a working first draft of the app within extremely short time frames—even a weekend!—with production deployment to follow just a few days later.
This article – the first in a series – demonstrates a real-life application development scenario: the creation of a mobile application that gives election canvassers a tool to identify, classify and inform voters in a huge suburban Chicago voting district – using the latest Oracle application development UI, data modeling tools, and database technology. Along the way, we’ll show how Oracle APEX makes short work of building a working application while the Oracle DBA leverages her newest tools—SQL Developer and Data Modeler—to build a secure, reliable, scalable application for her development team.

There are several methods used and developed over the years/decades since the Oracle Database has been around to migrate or clone your databases. Most of the methods have required us to use Data Guard or GoldenGate to achieve the same with minimal downtime or RMAN Backup files/Database Datafiles for regular cloning.

With the 12cR1 version of the database, remote cloning was introduced but still required to place the source non-CDB or PDB into Read-Only mode before initiating the cloning. With 12cR2, one has the ability to clone a database (also known as hot-cloning) without the restriction of read-only or downtime on the source. Also, hot-cloning can be achieved without an existing backup of the source.

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We’ve all been there. When the rubber meets the road, it seems like the database, operations and development teams are never quite in-sync. No matter how thoroughly executed, tested, documented and validated, something in the production environment is never quite the same as the lower environments – be it a hardware inconsistency, a code mismatch, or even the dreaded typoed command. To add insult to injury, code always seems to change between the time it leaves a developer’s laptop and when it is deployed to a mission-critical system.
Solving these issues is the primary motivator behind DevOps. Often misinterpreted as a buzzword endorsing development teams taking over platform and infrastructure roles, DevOps is all about development and operational modernization. Rather than operating as siloed, asynchronous teams as has been the norm for decades, DevOps represents a fundamental, holistic, organization-wide shift not only in processes and tools, but in people and culture.