UK ETA application seems to be limited to US7ASCII 😡 Took me a few tries to realise this, error message was just "Please enter Address Line 1"... or "Please enter a town/city". No, just removing diacritics is not OK, completely different letters.

Auditors asking questions- why I randomised db_name. Well it is a very short string that easily overlaps, so for automation. Db_unique_name and global_name are set correctly.

Reminds me of the Sheldon-Amy conversation about triple-negations. Was Oracle inspired by it? :)

So much want to rant now about database drivers and IT slop in general, but I think I’ll arrive in Nürnberg today too late to join the conference party and rant over beers, will probe about afterparty

Morning starts with a very bad and vague cry for help from Australia. I understand this person has a problem for a while, and has created multiple jiras, but reading them all follow the pattern of garbage in garbage out.

Interesting, I thought south of Germany would be much warmer, but no. Maybe no point to go to the mountains near Munich then

Arrgh, so much for ordering a NAS replacement drive from Amazon (my local dealer did not have the same model in stock). Dead On Arrival.

The upcoming ACE meeting starts in an ominous way.

Some paper books arrived

#fridayMotivation If it doesn't work, add "-f"

Maybe LLMs start being useful, when they ingest some Little Britain and start saying "no".

I like when people gather, sit quietly and listen an album in full. Later discuss with the artist and geek out.

Nice, got HashiCorp Vault dynamic database credentials working with MongoDB. The "authentication database" concept takes some getting used to. Anyway, can now hand out temporary read-only accounts for devs in production, authenticated and authorised by Azure Entra.

UKOUG booked, rather complicated one. ARN-TLL for Kara-Lis Coverdale/Maarja Nuut/Robert Nikolajev concert, TLL-BHX for UKOUG, BHX-ARN for home.

UKOUG, awwww cute

DOAG booked, will spend the weekend in München after conference. Never been there before. Mountains also look tasty around there.

Added HashiCorp Vault dynamic database credentials support for Oracle DB exporter for prometheus github.com/oracle/oracl...

Why car rental is so cheap in Croatia- damage gets invented and 500€ added to bill. What a tourist ripoff Avis. I do have a before video, all these scratches visible.

Deutcshe Welle missed a crucial bit here, this is LOCAL election, NOT parliament election. Rather common that EU citizens can vote in what EU country they are resident of in LOCAL elections. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HplP...

This is how a latch contention looks in real life. The @ora600pl.bsky.social way at #HrOUG2025

Dubrovnik panorama fail 🤦

Accommodation for tonight, near šibenik country side. Olive farm. Now let’s watch the sun set and tomorrow to Rovinj.

Not good, I have multiple expensive SoundTouch devices. Inevitable I guess. “Smart” has turned into a swear word. “Buy dumb” yes please

Dubrovnik apartment amenities

Finally arrived in Croatia. 1,5h delay in Frankfurt, while sitting in plane and waiting for FRA crew to load the luggage. And then Zagreb car rental gave me a Chinese car (big car, but clearly for driver half my size, lots of road noise, would not buy), and then 2h driving in darkness on small roads

Caught in the trap of expecting * and + in HashiCorp Vault policies to work like regexp, again.

On my Way to HrOUG - 4 hour layover in Frankfurt. Lounges were full and didn't accept my money :(

That explanation that OKV is needed for TDE, because you never know what response 3rd party libraries may give and always problems with them... PKCS#11 is a standard, so very much sounds like Oracle has not itself implemented it by-the-book, if so many libraries have problems with Oracle.

HashCorp Vault has far better SSH access management than Oracle Key Vault developer.hashicorp.com/vault/docs/s...

Added HashiCorp Vault support for oracle prometheus exporter. Will PR to main repo, when the legaleese goes through github.com/ilmarkerm/or...

My HrOUG presentation is not progressing, yesterday spent full day writing solution to a client who I knew didn't want it. Today did some Go coding for Oracle Prometheus Exporter, again, wasn't urgent. Time is running out.

Angry ticket from developers, why did "CREATE INDEX IF EXISTS" work in test envs, but not in prod. Chill, I'm just about to patch prod to 19.28. Normally would be excited, that devs actually read database new features guide, but lets be honest, it's LLM generated statement.

Please do not Americanise our news. Since when is ”a football pitch” a valid unit of measurement? It’s not even helpful if there are 600 of them.

Tuesday evening philosophy - if it works for 10 row table, it might not work for 1,5b row table FTS FTW

Got 10+ Indian recruiter invitations yesterday in LinkedIn, all offering the same? position - database was spelled wrong (data base). Are they scraping the same job posting sites and then phishing for private info (send me updated cv)?

AI is like Top Gear - ambitious, but rubbish

A small Go module for TLS endpoint monitoring/testing. In addition to what it provides over standard Go functionality, is the ability to talk some STARTTLS protocols - in this release MySQL and PostgreSQL. Was pretty fun to discover the MySQL/PostgreSQL handshake protocols github.com/ilmarkerm/go...

Office days are hard

I don't think I have visited UK after brexit... lets go and see how it has changed

I understand mostly enterprise troubleshooting is based on timing coincidences exclusively, if two or more things happen roughly at the same time, they are related - but database storage latency issue in country A and web service TLS cert expiring 3 minutes later 1000km away, are not related.

Big release day... lets start going over the release lists. I predict many jiras with connection failures coming later today

Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power, just ask Larry Ellison

Argh, there is always one who says NoGO. And I have done a bit of destruction already.

Dinner tonight- Nordic Mediterranean fusion confusion. Simplest easiest potatoes + dill + chanterelle-sauce with expensive tuna steak

DIscovered in horror that I have forgotten to buy flight tickets to HrOUG

Provisioned yet another pgvector, but this time jira came with a specific comment - "part of trying to move away from ChromaDB, after giving up on waiting on Oracle23ai"

Looks like EDB marketing has also renamed their product "EDB Postgres AI" www.enterprisedb.com/sites/defaul...

4x 125% FTP next. The horror

Nice good-mood-inducing morning in Poznan. Just attended good-mood-inducing #POUG2025 in Poznan. Life is good. Thanks @luizafrompoland.bsky.social Thanks @ora600pl.bsky.social Thanks @pougorg.bsky.social You’re the best! You make the best events! See you all next year.

What can I say, THANK YOU! #POUG2025 @luizafrompoland.bsky.social