February 23

Oracle Cloud – Stairway to Heaven…?

I was lucky to be granted some Oracle Cloud subscriptions. Today I needed an 11.2.0.4 environment to check some customer issues and due to VM overload on my laptop (no space/not enough memory), I tried to use the Oracle Cloud solution alternative. In these “Oracle Cloud” posts of mine, you can read up on my newbie experiences (and see a lot of pictures of) the experience I had getting in the Oracle Cloud.

I will note my thoughts here and leave it up to you if it matches your needs… In all the posts hopefully provide a “first glance” of what Oracle has to offer, when making the decision for Oracle Cloud offerings. Today my first glance at the Oracle “Database as a Service” offering…

Subscription needed…

Of course first you will need a subscription. When signed up, a email will be provided with all the details on the services you have signed up for. There are temporary free trail offerings, if you want to play first, pay later (if it is what you are looking for…)

SSH Key…

After you log in and attempt to create a service, you will notice that you will need to create a SSH key first.

The first steps regarding the “Database as a Service” offering are clearly described in:

I created my “oracleCloud” keys on my Mac via entering the following on a command prompt as described in “Create an SSH key pair” via:

And thats about it actually. You are now able to create database instances in the Oracle Cloud.

Creating a 11gR2 database instance…

When you log in into the database service console area, you will be presented with an overview of your services. Initially this will have no services to show. After you have created services, like the following (I created a 11.2 and 12.1 environment), it will give an overview of the status of your environments.

  • You start creating services by clicking on the “Create Service” – button.

Now you will be presented with two options. One for a database service environment and one for the same but then in a Virtual Image environment. I haven’t created the latter yet, so the following is only referring to an “Oracle Database Cloud Service” offering. I currently want a quick and dirty environment to check some functionality (and cross reference between 11.2 and 12.1) so I choose:

  • Click “Oracle Database Cloud Service” and clicked the “Next” button and left the billing frequency as is.
  • As mentioned I had a free trial offering. If I was paying for the offering, I probably would have checked the “Hourly” subscription, that is, do my testing and then drop the environment or something of the like.

The next page will provide you, currently, with the two different database versions (11..2.0.4 / 12.1.0.2) but there is patch functionality, as we will see later on…

  • I started with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and left everything “as is” while clicking next.

My believe is that the “Enterprise Edition – High Performance” option, is probably one of the best regarding overall functionality / price offering (for most customers), if not only Diagnostic and Tuning Pack functionality is allowed as well. What is best for your business goal is of course up to you.

Anyway, as always its in the eye of the beholder, but have a look here regarding current offerings: Database Cloud Pricing

  • I choose “Enterprise Edition – High Performance” and clicked the “Next” button.

The next page needs a bit more attention. You will have to fill in at least:

  • Service name
  • Shape (compute)
  • Timezone
  • SSH Public Key
  • Usable Database Storage
  • Administration password for the database
  • Database Instance Identifier
  • (National) Character Set
  • Backup Destination details

As mentioned, first time here fiddling around with it, if not only via a free trail subscription, but it is probably a good idea to figure out what kind of “Compute Shape” offering you might need.

There rest is more or less straight forward for the average database administrator / developer guys, so because we created our SSH keys beforehand we can now…

…

…fill in most values and upload of copy/paste the SSH key details.

  • I had created a SSH key, so I uploaded it via the page functionality here shown.

  • To show some “peculiar” details regarding, in this case accepted password values…see the following screen…

  • Just wanted to test quickly, so I answered “None” regarding the option for “Backup and Recovery Configuration”
  • Click next to get an overview and to actually create the wanted database instance

  • It took between 15 – 30 minutes (didn’t do precise timing) or so to create the 11.2.0.4 instance. In between I also created a 12c environment
  • In the end you will be presented with a page that give you the status and details of the instance. Also you see here the possibility to do some administration. Later

Creating a 12cR1 database instance…

So most of the screens are the same. The screens shown here after are the most noticeable differences (comparing to the 11.2 screenshots).

Same exercise here but pay attention to:

  • You get a multitenant environment (no option to create a single instance only environment)
  • Possibility to include a “Demos” PDB.

…

Administration & Patching

On the administration page, there are several options

  • You can click on the available icons to get more options / information
  • On the “menu” icons, you can
    • Pre-check the environment before applying available patches
    • Patch the environment with available patches
  • Start administration consoles

  • If you apply a patch via the “Patch” option, if will warn you that the database environment will be restarted. You also can “force apply the patch”. I didn’t try it but I am guessing that the instance will be bounced via a more aggressive option like “abort”.

  • You will now be presented with the progress information of the patch process

A pre-patch operation will involve, at least as it is mentioned in the detail page, with

Via the menu option you have the possibility to be redirected to the following pages / consoles:

  • DBaaS Monitor Console
  • Application Express Console
  • GlassFish Administration Console
  • EM Console

Database as a Service overview

  • It is also possible to get re-directed to these consoles directly from the main Database as a Service overview page.

  • And/or get additional information via the activity page regarding, for example, “create service” and “patch” info.

Administration consoles…

By default the mentioned consoles are blocked.

As mentioned in the section “Enabling Access to a Compute Node Port”

When a Database as a Service instance is created, the following Oracle Compute Cloud Service security rules are created, but set to a disabled status.

  • ora_p2_dbconsole, which controls access to port 1158, the port used by Enterprise Manager 11g Database Control.
  • ora_p2_dbexpress, which controls access to port 5500, the port used by Enterprise Manager Database Express 12c.
  • ora_p2_dblistener, which controls access to port 1521, the port used by SQL*Net.
  • ora_p2_http, which controls access to port 80, the port used for HTTP connections to the instance.
  • ora_p2_httpadmin, which controls access to port 4848, the port used by the Oracle GlassFish Server administration console.
  • ora_p2_httpssl, which controls access to port 443, the port used for HTTPS connections to the instance, including Oracle REST Data Services, Oracle Application Express, and the Oracle Cloud on-instance database monitor.

To enable access to a compute node port, you enable the appropriate security rule.

By default only the SSH and Trusted Listener ports are accessible. Everything else has to be enabled via the “Compute Service”.

  • You can access the “Compute Cloud Services” via the left upper menu icon.

  • You will be now re-directed to the “Compute Cloud Service” page. Here you get an overview of the services.

  • When clicking on the “Network” tab, under “Security Rules”, you now can enable or disable all the port console restrictions as needed.

The following gives you an overview of what is possible in these “Security Rule” sections.

  • For the defined ones, you can here easily enable or disable the access to the service.

 

  • And / or you can create new security rules as needed…

After you have enabled port access, you can access directly, for example, the

  • The Glassfish service
  • The APEX service
  • The “old” Oracle Enterprise Manager console for 11.2 or…
  • The DB Express console for 12.1




In short, it has not been that difficult to create and open up a 11.2, 12.1 database environment. I hope this post helps a bit to get a feeling of the Cloud offerings from Oracle as mentioned on cloud.oracle.com.

And now, as it was my intention, it is time to do some functionality testing for my customer 😎

Next steps:

Have fun.

HTH/M.

CategoriesCloud Oracle Oracle Cloud

Tagsblocked port Compute Cloud Service Database as a Service Oracle Cloud Oracle Database Cloud

Marco Gralike Written by: