I like reading about the hardware and software various people use so here’s my version. Introduction I work for Oracle as a technical consultant based in the UK (fully remote). I’m old and evolved from a Unix/C developer to PL/SQL, Oracle DBA and now work on database migrations and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Hardware Lenovo ThinkCentre M900. Intel i7-6700 Memory 48GB (upgraded from 16GB) Disk 1TB Samsung Galaxy S24 Expensive phone kindly provided by my employer. I don’t use many apps (Gmail, WhatsApp, BBC Sport, Tusky). ...

Occasionally I find myself migrating Oracle databases between environments using Data Pump. Enterprise applications tend to use multiple tablespaces for logical separation (and historical reasons). However, this isn’t possible when the target database is Autonomous Database (ADB) hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). ADB is a managed service so DBA’s can’t create tablespaces and are limited to ‘DATA’. However, Oracle 19c Data Pump supports wildcards for the REMAP_TABLESPACE parameter which allows multiple tablespaces from the existing application to be mapped to the ADB DATA tablespace. ...

I was interested by Kev Quirk’s “Blog Questions Challenge”, so here’s my answers. To recap, the questions are: Why did you start blogging in the first place ? What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it ? Have you blogged on other platforms before ? How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog ? When do you feel most inspired to write ? Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft ? What’s your favourite post on your blog ? Any future plans for your blog ? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature ? Why did you start blogging in the first place ? I had a web site from 1999 but this was essentially a set of static HTML pages. ...

Stung by the criticism of our Football Web Pages APEX application, we decide to try to address the various issues raised by end users and peer code review. When clicking ‘Fixtures’, I get ‘ORA-20999: REST Data Source returned an HTTP error: HTTP 400: Bad request’ If you enter a Competition only, it works fine. If you enter a Team only, it works fine. If you enter both a ‘Competition’ and ‘Team’, the results look weird. Should ‘Team’ be a cascading LOV based on the ‘Competition’ ? The column names and labels need tidying up. There are a lot of meaningless ID fields displayed. It would be nice to have the option to review past results separately from fixtures in the future. Performance - the Popup LOV’s for Competition and Team are sluggish. Why are they so S L O W ? The navigation menu looks chaotic and ugly. HTTP 400 error entering Fixtures report This error is because the REST parameter for ‘Competition’ or ‘Teams’ is required. When we first run this page, there no values defined for the ‘Competition’ or ‘Teams’ parameters which results in the error. ...

Flushed after the success of getting GoToSocial 0.5.2 working successfully, I was about to celebrate with a cup of tea when this post appeared in my timeline about the release of 0.6.0 (Release Candidate 1). Good morning everyone! We just cut the first release candidate for v0.6.0 of GoToSocial: v0.6.0-rc1. There’s a preposterous amount of changes included in this one (we’ll do a proper organized list when we do the release proper). ...

I like experimenting with software and technology. Many years ago, I built a Laconica instance. Not because I needed a Laconica instance but because I was curious and any knowledge gleaned would be useful. Standard LAMP stack. Same as the WordPress blogging software which I had already built. Plus Laconica releases were named after R.E.M songs by Evan. Similarly, I got an account on mastodon.sdf.org in preference to Twitter because I favour OpenSource software and the underdog. ...

In the last article, we created a simple APEX application fetching data about English football from the Football Web Pages site which provides an authenticated REST API. However, all I really want to do is to quickly look at Kingstonian’s forthcoming fixtures for the next month. Fortunately, there is an FWP API providing that information. Endpoint: https://football-web-pages1.p.rapidapi.com/fixtures-results.json Matches - The current list of matches for a competition/team The following parameters may be set: comp - The ID of the competition (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) team - The ID of the team (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) We already have created an APEX report listing all the available Competitions (including the numeric ID values) so it would be useful to have a similar report listing all the Teams. ...

Introduction The last article provided a quick introduction to REST APIs. Now we will use a simple REST API to develop an APEX application using a real world example. Football Web Pages I enjoy watching football (soccer). My local team are Kingstonian FC, a non-league team in South West London. Kingstonian play in the seventh tier of English football. Kingstonian’s players are semi-professional so the players hold down jobs and train and play part-time. ...

Background REST API’s are a popular means of manipulating data. REST API’s use a client-server model. The server is a web server and the client is a Web application or a Python, Perl, Java, .NET, Node.js or COBOL program. REST is an abbreviation for ‘Representational State transfer’ while API is another abbreviation for ‘Application Program Interface’. This all sounds complicated and almost intimidating but it’s not. Database developers have been manipulating data using a client (SQL*Plus) from a server (Oracle database) for many years. ...