Cloud

Large Language Models (LLM) are everywhere now, now you can even get help with your SQL. A few months back, Oracle introduced a feature in the Autonomous Database where you can ask normal questions in order to query your data. First Journey with SelectAI Brendan Tierney at Oralytics has written two good articles, SelectAI – the beginning of a journey and SelectAI – Doing something useful on a cool feature in the Oracle Autonomous database; SelectAI. He shows how you in a few steps can query your data using natural language. I followed the steps in his posts, and in a few minutes got it to work in my own Autonomous Database that I am using in the Oracle Free Tier. ...

Of course there is nothing special about restoring a database from the cloud on your own down-on-earth server, but it helps making this post cool and cloudy. When I deployed XE to an AWS instance I made a small script to backup the database once pr day (scheduled in crontab), and another to fetch the backupset to my server here on earth. Backup script looks like this: #!/bin/sh ORACLE_SID=XE ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH export ORACLE_SID ORACLE_HOME PATH rman target / << EOF > $HOME/script/rman.$$ backup database plus archivelog delete input; delete noprompt obsolete; list backup of database summary; EOF By default the XE is installed without archiving so you need to change that when you install your production XE database. I also turned on auto backup of the controlfile. The RMAN configuration for the XE database looks like this: ...

… on a server in the sky I had two things on my agenda, test out HP Cloud and ThinkUp. HP Cloud is still in private beta, but I was lucky to get an invitation after registration. They aim to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and so far I think they have a good chance. It is rather easy to just order and set up a new server in the cloud. A simple and easy interface with few buttons. It is tempting to include a few screen shots here, but I’m not sure if the agreement I just signed allows it. If they expand the interface with more features I hope they keep this simple version for impatient people who just need a server right now. I’ve had great fun with AWS also, but it is crowded with features and things to figure out. For my need of testing a web application the HP Cloud seems just perfect. ...