oracle – Kev's Development Toolbox

February 3, 2021February 3, 2021

Reprogramming and flashing the Oracle Code Card from Oracle World/Code One

I don’t know why I didn’t realize this sooner or even bother to check, but the ‘Code Card’ with the e-ink screen that was given away at Oracle World a couple of years ago for an interactive lab has a ESP8266 chip on it that can be flashed with new code using a USB cable and the Arduino IDE.

The original repo for the Arduino source for the card has unfortunately had the source for the card removed, but luckily there’s a fork that still has the code, here.

There’s notes in the Arduino folder about flashing the card. These mostly worked for me apart from I found this sequence worked best:

connect the card to your pc with a USB cable
power on the card with the switch on the side
hold the A button, don’t let go (this is important)
if you have the serial tool window open in the Arduino IDE you’ll see the messages per the docs
Start the Upload of your new code
When the upload is connected and starts uploading, then you can let go of the A button

There’s a post with some more details here.

March 30, 2020March 30, 2020

node.js, node-oracledb and Oracle Instant Client

To access an Oracle DB from an AWS Lambda function developed with node.js, you need to package you Lambda with shared libraries from Oracle’s Instant Client. The install instructions are here ( http://oracle.github.io/node-oracledb/INSTALL.html#quickstart ) but the only part that is really needed is the download location (since there’s no specific instructions for bundling the libs with an AWS Lambda): https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html

Not all the Oracle Instant Client files are needed. From this older npm module to automate the packaging of the required libraries, I used this same list of required libraries:

libclntshcore.so.19.1
libclntsh.so.19.1
libmql1.so
libipc1.so
libnnz19.so
libons.so (not packaged in current Instant Client)
libociicus.so
libaio.so (from separate download - see next step)

libaio – if you’re on a Linux platform you can ‘apt-get install libaio’ or similar, but building my Lambda on a Mac I had to manually download the package and extract just the .so file from here (download the Arch Linux x64 package): https://pkgs.org/download/libaio

Put these in a /lib dir and zip up the folder and files. Use this to create a Lambda Layer.

For the Lambda itself install the node.js module for the api:

npm install –save node-oracledb

For examples in api usage, see the examples here: https://github.com/oracle/node-oracledb/tree/master/examples

March 29, 2020March 29, 2020

Installing Oracle Instant Client and Tools in an AWS EC2

I’m using the AWS Amazon Linux 2 AMI on my EC2. To download the Oracle Instant Client get the download urls for the instant client and instant client tools from: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html

Download using curl and install with rpm:

curl instant-client-url-from-page-above --output instant-client.rpm
rpm -i instant-client.rpm
curl instant-client-tools-from-page-above --output instant-client-tools.rpm
rpm -i instant-client-tools.rpm

To connect using sql-plus:

sqlplus 'admin@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=your-instance-endpoint.rds.amazonaws.com)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=your-db-name)))'

Enter password when prompted.