As Uncle Ben would say, "Remember, with great power, comes great responsibility." With the release of Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) version 19.4.6, many of us were eager to deploy a customer-managed ORDS solution in order to support vanity URLs with Oracle Application Express (APEX), myself included. It has worked well for me until a few days ago, I noticed that my Oracle JET charts weren't loading any more.
In my previous post, we looked at installing and configuring Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) and have it work with Oracle Application Express (APEX) that comes preinstalled with every Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB). Like APEX, ORDS is also included as a feature of the ADB. However, there are certain situations where you might like to manage your own instance of ORDS.
The Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) is Oracle's current flagship database product and rightly so! Each instance comes with self-tuning, self-patching and several Oracle Database Options that customer would otherwise have to purchase separate licenses for. Database developers will also be pleased to know that there are a suite of tools at your disposal including Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) and Oracle Machine Learning Notebooks.
The minimum instance you can create will have 1 CPU and 1 TB of storage and with so much features, doesn't come cheap. Here's the good news though, Oracle provides everyone two Always Free ADBs through the Oracle Cloud Free Tier offering. Yes, that's a great deal for anyone wanting to host a simple web application on the Internet. It is however, not without limits.
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.
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.
In case you missed it (which is almost impossible), the Oracle Autonomous Database (AutonomousDB) is Oracle's hottest offering on the Oracle Cloud and it now comes fitted with what is arguably the best feature of the Oracle Database: Oracle Application Express (APEX). I have a few more days to go with this trial, so why not take one out for a spin?