A reader left an interesting comment/question in my previous post on Making the Move to the Autonomous Database:

"Would You explain how can i check my on-premise DB to satisfy ADB size limitation 20G? What is the size 20G of?"

This is an excellent question to ask before embarking on any Autonomous Database (ADB) migration plans and so I dug a bit deeper.

My #ThanksOGB will be short and sweet!

Most in the community probably don't know, but I am a sucker for military stories and even more crazy about hard-to-find memorabilia. Earlier this year, I took a gamble and started a little social experiment and minted a small batch of APEX Challenge Coins.

The coins demonstrated our deep appreciation for APEX developers who have impacted our lives. Through the process of distributing them worldwide, I was blessed to have basked in the warmth of givers and the happiness of receivers. Words cannot describe the emotions and joy I felt each time someone opens his or her little mail packet to find a gift of gratitude.

So... for my #ThanksOGB appreciation post this year, I wanted to express again, my heartfelt gratitude to all APEX Challenge Coin sponsors for making this project a success. Thank you for supporting APEX developers!

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have created my Oracle Cloud Free Tier account and provisioned an Autonomous Database (ADB). Now, I'm ready to move my existing Oracle Application Express (APEX) to this new environment. Next, I'll describe the steps I took to move (1) workspace, (2) application and (3) data, from the old to new database.

As mentioned in a previous post, the Free Tier for Oracle Cloud (OCI) is every Oracle Developer's dream. For a while now, I have hosted a personal Oracle Application Express (APEX) instance on Linode. It currently runs an older Oracle Database 11gR2 Express Edition (XE), and I would like to upgrade it to version 18c. The key issue I had though, was that the existing virtual machine hosted on Linode, only has one gigabyte of RAM and that does not meet the 18c XE minimum requirement of two. That left me procrastinating for a long time, but perhaps a blessing in disguise. With this new offering, the next steps are pretty obvious.

Too good to be true? No, it's true!!!

After hearing the rumours for a few years now, Mr Larry Ellison finally announced the availablility of a Free Tier for the Oracle Cloud. The gift bundle includes two small compute instances and two Autonomous Databases. These offerings are a tiny fraction of what the Oracle Cloud provides, but are sufficient for Oracle Developers to maintain their own 24x7 development environments and possibly even production applications for small businesses and non-profit organisations.

Like everyone else in the Oracle Application Express (APEX) community, I wasted no time in getting my account provisioned and am currently working towards moving workspaces and applications from my old personal APEX instance, hosted on Linode.