SQLcl
Easier & More Secure Connections
You can now SAVE and REUSE connections to your Oracle Database in SQLcl. The big benefits here are SECURITY and EASE-OF-USE.
If you choose to store your passwords in a secured WALLET, you won’t have to worry about them showing up in your command history or SCRIPT OUTPUT logs anymore. And, it’ll be much easier to connect to your databases.
There is a new commend, CONNMGR, and the CONNECT command has been enhanced.
Let’s connect as we normally would using EZCONNECT syntax. And then let’s save the connection, including it’s password.
This is telling SQLcl to create a new named connection ‘HRPWD’, based on the current connection properties, and I’m using the ‘-savepwd’ parameter to have the password stored as well.
Now let’s use our connection.
SQLcl knows what this connection is, just like it would be if you were using a connection in the connection tree of SQL Developer.
Once I’m connected, we can confirm everything by using the ‘show connection’ command.
Collecting/Shipping database stats to OCI Metrics Service
You can now use SQLcl to actively query various database performance statistics, and then have those numbers copied up to your OCI Metrics Service.
Don’t use the Oracle Cloud, yet? Then you can skip this section, for now 
What you need:
- An OCI account
- Your OCI Profile setup on your machine
- An Oracle Database to monitor
- A highly privileged user
- SQLcl 23.2
- The OCID for the COMPARTMENT you want to stow the stats in
I set my profile –
Now I can run the ocidbmetrics command.
Once that’s going, and it will KEEP GOING until you KILL IT, SQLcl will continously run a ton of queries.
When you’re ready to see the stats, hop on over to your OCI Console.
Dirty Secret: the Metrics service doesn’t CARE where these stats come from. I’m storing the data collected from my on-premises copy of Database 23c Free Developer Edition VirtualBox appliance!
I can do a lot of things with these stats, including setting alarms! I did a talk at Cloud World last year about making your Oracle Database be more ‘Cloud Native’ – this is a continuation of that idea.
The Talk
ORDS
There are some pretty significant updates in this ORDS release. For one, we now have a default landing page when you are running ORDS Standalone. Instead of a 404 or redirect for APEX when you go to /ords
If you don’t like this (APEX users), there’s a config parameter you can use to turn this off. Those docs should be live within 24 hrs.
There’s a LOT more to talk about these releases, this post is just a tease/summary. Be on the look-out for more details going forward.
Well, maybe I should end with just one more tease.
The “Killing Pool”
I can now tell ORDS to destroy a pool. This will cause the connection pool to be ‘killed,’ and then subsequently reloaded on the next request for a resource in that pool. That means ORDS will re-read the config files. So instead of having to BOUNCE ORDS to have a pool config take effect, you can now use the DESTROY command.
For this to work, you’ll need to know the process ID that ORDS is running with. Under the covers, we’re using the JMX features to do the Oracle Universal Connection Pool (UCP) work.
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