For a long time now, I have been eagerly awaiting for out-of-the-box RSA encryption support with pure PL/SQL. Not so much for to sharing secrets, but rather, the ability to sign messages and verify signatures. I might have missed the announcements, but it looks like my wait is over support with asymmetric key operations added in 21c, and (perhaps backported) in 19c as-of release 19.9.
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.
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?
I have written on two occasions, "Just a Drop of Oracle APEX" and "APEX and the Affordable Cloud!", about how easy it is to get up and running on hosting providers like Linode and DigitalOcean. The approach largely involves Vagrant, and though it is an easy to use tool, it still needed a little bit of DevOps heroism, and sometimes, dealing with API keys may not necessarily be a priority for someone looking for a quick way to setup a consistent and robust Oracle Application Express environment.
Here's my first contribution to the annual ODC Appreciation Day that was initiated by Tim Hall three years ago.
The product feature that I'd like to pay special tribute to this year is Oracle Multimedia (OMM). By now, I believe most would have heard that OMM has been deprecated. Mike Dietrich made special mention of it in a blog post earlier this year, with some clarity as to exactly when we can expect to see this useful feature go away for good.