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This post is the last post of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

By now we have seen how you can set up the different components from the Always Free Oracle Cloud.

During Oracle Open World I talked to the people behind the Always Free Oracle Cloud, and they told me that when your account is inactive for a specified amount of time (I forgot if it's 5 days, or a week or more?), your instance is being backed-up to the Object Storage. You can see it as a VM which is being put in stand-by or halted and saved to disk. When you need it again, it can be restored, but it takes time and it might be annoying when you don't know this is what is happening.

If you have a production app running in the Fee Oracle Cloud, be sure people use your app at least once inside the window Oracle foresees. Maybe in the future, Oracle could foresee a setting where we can specify the (in-)activity window as a developer.

I'm really impressed by this free offering of Oracle and see many use cases for development environments and small to midsize applications. I believe the limits we get in the free plan are really generous of Oracle and much more than any other cloud provider. Here's a quick overview of what it looks like at the time of writing:

• 2 Autonomous Databases, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB storage
• 2 Compute virtual machines, each with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory
• Storage:  2 Block Volumes, 100 GB total. 10 GB Object Storage. 10 GB Archive Storage.
• Additional Services:  Load Balancer, 1 instance, 10 Mbps bandwidth. Monitoring, 500 million ingestion data points, 1 billion retrieval data points. Notifications, 1 million delivery options per month, 1,000 emails sent per month. Outbound Data Transfer, 10 TB per month.

So what if you outgrow these limits? It means your applications are successful, so you can be proud of that :) and at that time hopefully, there's enough revenue to upgrade to a Paid Oracle Cloud plan. This can be done super easy... you click the upgrade to the paid plan button and there you go!Oracle will copy your DB, instance, ... and you go from there.
The way that Oracle is doing the upgrade is really cool, as it means you keep your free instance. So I see myself doing some development on the free instance, then for production upgrade to a paid plan. At that time I still have the development environment. The other free service could be the TEST environment, so you have DEV, TEST both free and PROD paid.

If you didn't check it out by now, go and try out the FREE Oracle Cloud yourself by going to https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ :)

Thanks Oracle!

This post is part of the OGB (Oracle Groundbreakers) Appreciation Day 2019, a thank you to everyone that makes the community great, especially those people that work at keeping us all moving!

Before I give my tip on how to add an error message from your PL/SQL code in your Page Process to a notification message in Oracle APEX, I want to start with thanking some people.

What keeps me going are a few things:

• The innovations of technology and more specifically the Oracle Database, ORDS, and Oracle APEX. I want to thank all the developers and the people behind those products. They allow me to help other people with the tools they create and keep on learning about the new features that are released. 
• I want to thank the fantastic #orclapex (Oracle APEX) and Groundbreakers community. I believe we are a great example of how people help and support each other and are motivated to bring the technology further. Over time I got to know a lot of people, many I consider now friends.
• I want to thank you because you read this, show your appreciation and push me forward to share more. I'm passionate about the technology I use. I love helping people with my skill set of developing software and while I learn, share my knowledge through this blog. 

So back to my tip of today... how do you show a message in the notification on a page?

You can do that with the APEX_ERROR PL/SQL API.

To see the usage yourself, create an empty page, with one region and a button that submits the page.In the Submit Process, simulate some PL/SQL Code where you raise an error.
For example:

That's it! Now you can get your errors in the notification message area of your Oracle APEX Page.

This post is the last post of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

By now we have seen how you can set up the different components from the Always Free Oracle Cloud. In this post, I want to show you how to keep your compute instances, databases, and load balancers up-and-running.

During Oracle Open World I talked to the people behind the Always Free Oracle Cloud, and they told me that when your account is inactive for a specified amount of time (I forgot if it's 5 days, or a week or more?), your instance is being backed-up to the Object Storage. You can see it as a VM which is being put in stand-by or halted and saved to disk. When you need it again, it can be restored, but it takes time and it might be annoying when you don't know this is what is happening.

There's a very easy way to keep your Always Free Oracle Cloud running all the time... just put activity on those machines, databases and APEX apps :) I'm not suggesting to log in yourself every day, rather create an automated job to create some activity on your account!

Log in to Oracle APEX and go to SQL Workshop > RESTful Services. By default the schema you are in is not registered with ORDS, so no RESTful Services are allowed. Click the Register Schema with ORDS button:


It will ask if you want to enable RESTful Access and if you want to install the Sample Service. Leave all defaults and click the Save Schema Attributes:


You are now all set to create your own RESTful service:


As a sample schema is created, we will just adapt one of the existing RESTful services.
Open the Modules and oracle.examples.hr > version > GET:


Here I changed the Source Type to be Query and the Source I made:

select apex_web_service.make_rest_request('https://dgielis.com', 'GET')
  from dual

Change my website to your website. Hit the Apply Changes button and copy the full URL and test it in a browser if you get something back.

Why am I'm doing that? This REST web service calls basically our web server on the compute instance. So on every call of this REST web service, our VM will have some activity. 

The last step is to complete the loop, and make sure that ATP has some activity.

Log in to your VM and become root (see in previous posts how to do that if you need help with this step). Add a cronjob to run a command to call our REST web service every hour:

crontab -e

0 * * * * curl -sL -w "%{http_code}\\n" "https://dgielis.com/ords/cloud/hr/version/" -o /dev/null

To check your crontab do:

crontab -l


There you go, now the compute instance is doing a call to ATP and ATP in return is doing a call to the VM :) we will now always have some activity on our instance and Oracle will never shut it down.

That's it... thanks so much for staying with me during the series and all the best with the Always Free Oracle Cloud.


Update 6-OCT-2019: because of Juergen's feedback, I want to explain further the reason for this post. This blog post was not intended to keep instances running for nothing. If you are a developer and want to try something and don't do anything with it afterward, it makes all sense for Oracle to backup/mute the instance so resources can be better used.
However, if you wrote an app for somebody who only uses it occasionally, and it falls in the window of Oracle muting it, the above technique can be used to keep it running. In that case, from the end-users perspective, they don't understand why they get an error and as a developer, you don't want to go in every time to fire things up again. I also wanted to explain what is happening when you don't use your instance, it's not staying there forever. Depending on when you read this, things might have changed, but this is the info I got from Oracle at Open World. In the comments, I went in more detail on two use cases I have myself.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

In my blog post Create a VM Instance (Compute Cloud) we created a VM instance in the Free Oracle Cloud. The cool thing is that you get two VMs for free. In this post, we will set up the other always free compute instance.

Just like when we created our first instance, hit the Create a VM instance:


Give your instance a name and before I just hit the Create button, BUT this time you want to create the Show Shape, Network and Storage Options first:


The most important part of that screen is the "Assign public IP address" section. If you don't need this Compute instance to be accessible from the internet you can ignore it, but if you want to host a website, for example, you might want to check it. If you didn't do it, you can always add a public IP later, but I personally found it cumbersome and hard to understand the network piece. I had to do many different steps to get it to work to have an internet connection to that machine, while when you have a public IP address, Oracle does everything for you... anyway, it depends on your use case what you need, but I do want to highlight it. Also, it seems that the default changed from when I wrote the first post; by default, you don't have a public IP address. It might be that Oracle is trying to push you to use a Load Balancer (see later on in this blog post) and that might actually make sense.


Clicking the Create button will show that your instance is being provisioned.


When you go back to the overview you should see both of your Always Free Compute instances:


Clicking on the name, you will get the details. This screenshot shows when you don't specify a public IP address.


To access that machine, as it doesn't have a public IP, I connected to my first instance and from there, as I am on the subnet, I can connect to the Private IP Address:


An alternative for a URL to go directly to your VM instance is to front it with a Load Balancer.

Which brings us to the Load Balancer topic. With the Always Free Oracle Cloud, we also get a Load Balancer for free. There are different use cases for using a Load Balancer, but here are my own reasons why I have used a Load Balancer before:

1. Distribute the traffic automatically over different machines. For example, when you use our APEX Office Print (AOP) Cloud you will actually hit our load balancer, behind the load balancer we have two to five different machines. It's not only to handle the large number of prints we get, but it also makes our lives easier when we want to upgrade without downtime. We upgrade one clone instance, and when done, new machines are brought online and old ones are shutdown. We patch our own service with zero downtime.
2. The Load Balancer has the SSL certificate and handles the HTTPS requests while the backend servers have HTTP.
3. On a Load Balancer, you have integrated health checks, so you can be warned when things go wrong, even when there's only one server behind the Load Balancer.

So lets get started to set up a Load Balancer in the Oracle Cloud:

Click on Networking > Load Balancers:


Click the Create Load Balancer button:


It will ask for a name and type. For the Always free instance, use Micro with Maximum Total Bandwidth.
By default Small is selected, so don't forget to change it:


Next you want to add a Backend to this Load Balancer, so click the Add Backends button:


In the pop-up you can select the instances you want to put behind this Load Balancer:


Furthermore, on the screen you can select a Health Check Policy:


In the next step, you can upload the SSL certificate, in case you want the Load Balancer to be accessible through HTTPS. You can also choose to just configure the Load Balancer for HTTP (which I don't recommend):


Hit the Create Load Balancer and you will get an overview that the Load Balancer is being created:


Once it's ready the icon turns green and you will see the Public IP Address of your Load Balancer:


Instead of putting the IP Address of your instance directly in the DNS of your domain name, you put the IP Address of the Load Balancer in.

A Load Balancer can do much more, you can have different Rules, SSL tunneling, etc. You can read more about that in the online documentation.

Hopefully, now you know how to set up a second compute instance and you have an idea what a Load Balancer can do for you.

We are almost done with this series... but you definitely want to read the next blog post, which is the last one where I give some important information to keep your Always Free instance running.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

In this post, we will configure the Oracle Cloud to support our instances, databases and Oracle APEX to send out emails. In my blog post 5. Setup APEX in ATP and create first APEX app, I initially said you can't use APEX_MAIL in APEX in ATP, but I was wrong, so I few days after my post I updated it, to point you to the documentation with the configuration steps you have to do to make it work.

The reason I thought you can't use APEX_MAIL was that during my tests, sending emails failed. I hadn't read the documentation ;) In this post, I will share how I got it to work after all.

The first thing you have to do is create an SMTP Credential for your user. You do that by logging into your Oracle Cloud account, go to Identity > Users and select your user:



Click the SMTP Credentials in the left menu:


Hit the Generate SMTP Credentials button, and give it a name:


On the next screen, you will see the USERNAME and PASSWORD. Take a note of this as you won't get to see it anymore after:


You will come back to the overview screen, but again, as far as I can see there's no way to get the password again, so if you lose it, you need to set up one again:


Now we will let Oracle APEX know about those parameters. Login as ADMIN through SQL Developer for example (see this blog post on how to do that) and run the following statement:

BEGIN
  APEX_INSTANCE_ADMIN.SET_PARAMETER('SMTP_HOST_ADDRESS', 'smtp.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com');
  APEX_INSTANCE_ADMIN.SET_PARAMETER('SMTP_USERNAME', 'ocid1.user.oc1..xxxxxxxxxxx@ocid1.tenancy.oc1..xxxxxxx');
  APEX_INSTANCE_ADMIN.SET_PARAMETER('SMTP_PASSWORD', 'Fxxxx');
  COMMIT;
END;
/


Here is a screenshot when running:



Log in to Oracle APEX, go to SQL Workshop and try to send out emails:


It says statement processed, but when you query the APEX_MAIL_QUEUE, you will see it's still stuck with an error ORA-29278: SMTP transient error: 471 Authorization failed:


There's one more step you have to do, specify the email addresses you want to allow to send emails from. Go in your Oracle Cloud Account Dashboard to Email Delivery and click the Email Approved Senders and hit the Create Approved Sender button




Add the email address you want to send emails from and hit the Create Approved Sender button:

In the overview you will see all allowed email addresses:


When we try to send again and check the APEX_MAIL_LOG, we see the emails are effectively sent:


That's it, you can now send emails out of your APEX apps :)

We are almost done with the series. In the next post we will create a second compute instance and set up a Load Balancer.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

In this post, we will install and use SQLcl and Datapump from the Compute Instance (VM) connecting to our Oracle Database in the Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) Cloud.
Although I use most of the time SQL Developer to connect to the database, I find it important to be able to use command-line tools too, as this is what you can automate and it's really fast.
In the previous post, we installed the command line tools of the Oracle Cloud on our own machine, but for the Oracle Tools, I prefer to install them on our Compute Instance in the Cloud. Especially when we want to automate something, it's easier to do this from another machine in the cloud. It also makes it easier to follow as we only have to focus on how to install the Oracle Tools on Linux.

Oracle Instant Client

In order to connect to an Oracle database from a machine, we will use the Oracle Instant Client software. You can download the software for the different operating systems, but as our VM is running Oracle Linux we can install it with just a few commands:

First, update yum so it's smarter where to find Oracle software:

yum install oracle-release-el7

Next, we can search for the Oracle Instant Client version we need:

yum search oracle-instant


We want to install the Oracle Instant Client version of the system we want to connect to. For the Free Oracle Database on ATP, it's Oracle Database Release 18.4, so we will pick Oracle Instant Client 18.5. To be honest, typically I take the latest version of the software, but when I tried that, the Oracle Instant Client complained the libraries were not compatible with the version we wanted to connect to. I always thought you could use newer versions of the Oracle tools against previous databases, but apparently, that is no longer the case (at least not during my tests). Anyway, it's good to have the version of the same tool as the version you connect to.
Install the Instant Client basic and tools packages:
yum install oracle-instantclient18.5-basic.x86_64
yum install oracle-instantclient18.5-tools.x86_64


As a last step we set some environment variables:

export PATH=/usr/lib/oracle/18.5/client64/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/oracle/18.5/client64/lib
export TNS_ADMIN=/usr/lib/oracle/18.5/client64/lib/network/admin

That's it! We can now use the Oracle tools. Note there's also a SQL Plus package, which allows you to connect from a command line to the database, but I prefer to use SQLcl as it has some cool features for Oracle APEX (e.g. exporting your app). Download SQLcl now.

Before we move on to installing SQLcl, make sure you still have the credentials (wallet) file we used when connecting with SQL Developer to our database. Just like with SQL Developer, we also need this with SQLcl to connect to our database. As a reminder here's the screenshot I'm talking about:


Upload both the SQLcl and Credentials zip file to the Compute Instance (VM):
scp -i .ssh/oraclecloud /Users/dgielis/Downloads/wallet_DBDIMI.zip opc@132.145.215.55:/tmp
scp -i .ssh/oraclecloud /Users/dgielis/Downloads/sqlcl-19.2.1.206.1649.zip opc@132.145.215.55:/tmp


Connect to your VM and unzip the files:

ssh -i .ssh/oraclecloud opc@132.145.215.55

unzip /tmp/wallet_DBDIMI.zip -d /usr/lib/oracle/18.5/client64/lib/network/admin

unzip /tmp/sqlcl-19.2.1.206.1649.zip -d /opt


Before we can run SQLcl we also need to make sure we have JAVA installed, as SQLcl depends on that:
yum install java

To make it easier to run SQLcl from anywhere we will create a symbolic link:

ln -s /opt/sqlcl/bin/sql /usr/lib/oracle/18.5/client64/bin/sql

Now we are ready to connect to our database on ATP:

sql admin@dbdimi_high


There we go... we can connect from our VM to our ATP database.

The next thing we want to do is export the data from our ATP database. We will use Datapump that came with the installation of the tools.

Run the command to export the schema CLOUD:

expdp admin@dbdimi_high \
exclude=index,cluster,indextype,materialized_view,materialized_view_log,materialized_zonemap,db_link \
data_options=group_partition_table_data  \
parallel=1 \
schemas=cloud \
dumpfile=export%u.dmp


So where did this export go? To the default DATA_PUMP_DIR directory we don't have direct access to... but to list the files in the directory we can do:

SELECT * FROM DBMS_CLOUD.LIST_FILES('DATA_PUMP_DIR');


Remember my previous blog post about the Object Storage, in which we set up a Backups bucket?
Oracle allows you to connect your Object Storage to your ATP database and that is exactly what we will do further on :)

We will use the same user we created earlier for CLI. In order to connect to ATP we need to set up an Auth Token. Go to the User Details of cliUser and click the Auth Tokens:


Click the Generate Token button:


There's the token... you only see it once, so make sure to copy it:


Next, connect to your ATP database and run the script to add the credentials to the ATP database:

begin
  dbms_cloud.create_credential(
    credential_name => 'DEF_CRED_NAME'
    , username => 'cliUser'
    , password => 'Frx}R9lD0O}dIgZRGs{:'
  );
end;
/


Now that the DBMS_CLOUD package has credentials, we can do other calls with this package.
To add the Datapump export files to the Object Storage, we can use the PUT_OBJECT procedure.

I created a small script to take all the files from the DATA_PUMP_DIR and put them in the backups Bucket in the Object Storage:

begin
  for r in (select object_name, bytes
              from dbms_cloud.list_files('DATA_PUMP_DIR'))
  loop
   dbms_cloud.put_object(credential_name => 'DEF_CRED_NAME',
     object_uri => 'https://objectstorage.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com/n/id9u4qbhnjxj/b/backups/o/'||r.object_name,
     directory_name => 'DATA_PUMP_DIR',
     file_name => r.object_name);
  end loop;     
end;
/

And when we check our bucket, we see the Datapump export files! Yay!


We also want to export our Oracle APEX apps. In some projects, I use the APEXExport utility, but now we will use SQLcl to export our APEX app 101:

apex export 101

In real life I typically create a few scripts which I can run one-by-one or combined in a general backup script. The script will export the Oracle schemas, the APEX apps and save the files to another location, in our case the Object Storage.

vi make_backup.sh


 Here are the details of the scripts which are called in the main backup script:


You can schedule this script with crontab, for example, every day at 2AM:


The above is just an example of what you can do to automate your backups. You have to decide how frequently you want to do those backups.


If you want to move your existing Oracle database and APEX apps to the Oracle Cloud, the steps are similar to above. You upload your Datapump export file to your Object Storage. Next, run the Data Pump Import with the dump file parameter set to the list of file URLs on your Cloud Object Storage and the credential parameter set to the name of the credential you created earlier. For example:

impdp admin/password@dbdimi_high \  
     directory=data_pump_dir \  
     credential=def_cred_name \
     dumpfile= https://objectstorage.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com/n/adwc/b/adwc_user/o/export%u.dmp \
     parallel=1 \
     partition_options=merge \
     transform=segment_attributes:n \
     transform=dwcs_cvt_iots:y transform=constraint_use_default_index:y \
exclude=index,cluster,indextype,materialized_view,materialized_view_log,materialized_zonemap,db_link

Next, you would create your APEX workspace and import the APEX apps.


In the next post, we dive again in Oracle APEX and how to send emails from your APEX app.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

In this post, we will look into how we can store and share files, with ourselves, with others, but also with our ATP Database, we set up earlier. The Oracle Cloud provides for this purpose Object Storage, and we get 20GB for free forever. This storage is also being used when you want to make backups of the database, and use Datapump to export and import data. In the previous blog post, when you followed the installation of the on-premises version of AOP, you actually connected to my Object Storage as the AOP zip file is on it.

Now we know the purpose of this Object Storage, let's get started to set it up.

Log in to the Oracle Cloud and navigate in the menu to Object Storage:

You arrive at the screen where you have to pick a compartment in the dropdown on the left. Compartments are used to organize your resources.


After selecting my compartment "dimi (root)", we get an overview of Buckets and we can create a new one by clicking on the Create Bucket button:


In the Create Bucket screen, you enter a name and the type of storage you want to add in that bucket.
First, we create an archive bucket, in which to store backups of our database:


In the next screen we create a standard bucket to share files with others:


We can now see we have two buckets: apexofficeprint (standad storage) and backups (archive storage). Note the 3 dots on the right of the bucket, which give you the ability to view details or perform some other actions:


As I wanted to share the AOP zip file in my object storage, in the menu I click the Edit Visibility link to make the bucket accessible for everybody (public).


Next, we will add a file to the bucket. Click the View Bucket Details:


We get the details of the Bucket and see an overview of the Objects in this Bucket:


Click the Upload Objects button:


Drag a file in the Drop files area and hit the Upload Objects button:


We arrive back in the overview screen:


Just like in the Buckets overview, in the Objects Overview next to the objects you have the 3 dots on the right to perform actions on the object:


Click the View Object Details and you find next to some info, the URL where your object is accessible from:


So to conclude, an Object Storage exists out of Buckets which live in a certain Compartment and a Bucket exists out of Objects. (Object Storage => Compartments => Buckets => Objects)


Above we used the Oracle Cloud website to work with our Object Storage, but I'm also interested to do this from the command line. For example, we automated our build process when we make a new release of APEX Office Print. In the final step, we want to upload the new zip file to the cloud. When we can do everything from the command line, we can script and automate it.


You can follow the documentation on how to install the Command Line Interface (CLI).

I did the following on OSX (from Terminal) to install CLI:

bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oracle/oci-cli/master/scripts/install/install.sh)"

The install script asked a few questions (where to install etc.) but I used all defaults and at the end, all was installed fine and I got the following screen:


At the end I moved everything from the bin directory in my default directory, so it's easier to call the CLI:

mv bin/* .

Next, configure CLI. We have to let the CLI know who we are. This is done by creating a config file and specifying the user CLI can connect as. Here we go:

./oci setup keys


Go to the Oracle Cloud website and set up a User based on the keys you created with CLI.

Go to Identity - Users in the menu and click the Create User button:


Enter a new user, as I wanted to create a user-specific for CLI I called it cliUser. Note that the email address you provide needs to be unique. I initially used the same email, but that didn't work.


Now we will need to add the key to this user. Click the View User Details button in the action menu of the user:


Click the Add Public Key button:


And copy the content of the ~/.oci/oci_api_key_public.pem file:


Next, we want to give this user Administrator privileges. To do so, go to Groups:


Click the Add User to Group button:


Select Administrators and hit the Add button:


Now, this user is all set to work with the Command Line Interface (CLI):


We will now configure the CLI to connect as the cliUser we just created.
In your terminal run in your home directory:

./oci setup config


The wizard asks for some OCIDs. Below I walk you through where to find them.

The user OCID, go to Identity > Users and the details of the user. Next to OCID click the Copy link:


The tenancy OCID you find in Administration > Tenancy Details:





















The location you find when you scroll down in the Regions section of the Tenancy screen. Yours will be highlighted in green.


The final question of the wizard is if you want to create a new RSA key, answer No and point to the file (and not the directory like I first did). This is how it looks like after answering the questions:


Once the wizard is complete, you are all set. You can view the config file by doing:

cat .oci/config


Next, we want to create a Bucket in a Compartment and add a file through the CLI to that bucket.

Before we can run the command, we have to know the OCI of the Compartment. Here're the steps to get to that. Identity > Compartments:


 In the Details you find the OCI:


Now that we have everything we need, we can run the command to create a bucket called clibucket:

./oci os bucket create -c ocid1.tenancy.oc1..aaaaaaaakmf6mlauyaqmkkcikiuu2ckmklhffxf2weheu3qtfnsvcuzfuiuq --name clibucket


On success, we get a JSON back with the details of the bucket. If it errors, you will get an error back with details in JSON format.

Just to make sure the bucket is there, go to the Oracle Cloud website and check if you see the bucket we created with CLI:


To add an object to the bucket, you can do:

./oci os object put -bn clibucket --file test1.txt


Other commands I use more frequently:

# Get a list of the objects:
./oci os object list -bn clibucket

# Download a file called test1.txt and save it on your system as test2.txt
./oci os object get -bn clibucket --file test2.txt --name test1.txt

A useful resource to know which commands the CLI understands is in this documentation.
I did the above as an administrator, but if you want to read more about restricted use, you can read about that in Lawrence Gabriel's blog post.

I believe now you have a good understanding of the Object Storage and how to work with it through the website or through CLI. One of the reasons I mentioned was to use the Object Storage as a place for backups... let's look into that now.

When we go to our Autonomous Database, select your database and go into details. In the Resources section you find a link Backups:


Normally backups are automatically taken in ATP, but you can also create a manual backup:


When you create a manual backup, you have to specify the Object Storage bucket you want the backup to be saved in. But, when I tried to create a manual backup it told me that this option is not available in the Always Free Tier. Also, it says that restore is not possible, so not sure what happens when you want to restore an automated taken backup... for now, I'm not relying on those backups, in my next blog post I will tell you what I do for backups.


In the next blog post of this series, I will walk you how to use the Object Storage with the ATP Oracle Database to export and import data.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

In the previous posts we setup our Always Free Oracle Cloud machine and an Autonomous Database with Oracle Application Express (APEX). In this post I want to show you how to get started with the popular printing and reporting engine, APEX Office Print (AOP). The AOP software makes it super easy to export your data into a nice looking PDF, a custom Excel file, a fancy Powerpoint or other output formats of your choice, just the way you want it.
AOP is being used by many customers, even Oracle internally, to export their data in the format they want. The data can come from the database, a REST or GraphQL web service, or even components like the Interactive Report/Grid from Oracle APEX. Although AOP works with any technology, it is most known in the Oracle APEX community as it's the easiest and most integrated print engine for Oracle APEX. You create a template in DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HTML or TEXT, specify the data source, and tell AOP in which format you want the output to be (PDF, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, HTML, Text) and AOP will do the rest! You can find more information in this presentation about AOP.

Christina Moore of Storm Petrel wrote me a few days ago following: "We have a client in one of our systems who generates a 1,888 page invoice monthly (about 2,000 pages). The most recent invoice was $1.3M USD and took 384MB. AOP handles it brilliantly. Well done. I can’t email it to you for confidentiality reasons, but know it has multiple sections that are merged with your tool too." I love feedback on the usage of AOP and am amazed how creative people are when developing with AOP!

I use AOP in every project because exporting/printing is a requirement sooner or later and an essential part of my Oracle APEX apps. So I thought to write how to use this in the Oracle Cloud :)

We have two options: we let our Oracle Autonomous Database and APEX talk to the AOP Cloud or we install an on-premises version of AOP on our own Compute VM. 
Ok, so lets get started...  open a browser and go to https://www.apexofficeprint.com and click the SIGN UP button:


Enter your email and hit Signup:


You will receive an email. Push the Confirm your email address button:


The browser will open where you can set a password for your account:


After hitting the Set Password button, you are logged in automatically and will see a Getting Started wizard:


Follow the wizard and you are all set! It should take less than 15 minutes :)

In short this is what the wizard will tell you:

1. Download the AOP software and unzip the file
2. Go to APEX > SQL Workshop > SQL Scripts > Upload and Run the file aop_db_pkg.sql which you find in the db folder. This will install the AOP PL/SQL API.
3. Go to APEX > Your APP > Shared Components > Plug-ins and Import the APEX Plug-ins you find in the apex folder.
4. Go to APEX > Your APP > Shared Components > Component Settings > APEX Office Print (AOP) and enter your API Key which you find in the Dashboard on the AOP site: 

The dashboard on https://www.apexofficeprint.com:

The Component Settings in your APEX app:


When you look closely at the previous screenshot of the Component Settings, look at the AOP URL.
The URL specifies where the AOP Server is running, which the AOP APEX Plug-in and AOP PL/SQL API communicate with. By default this is set to the AOP Cloud, so you don't have to setup an AOP Server in your own environment.

Although the AOP Cloud is really convenient as it's maintained and support by the APEX Office Print team, some customers prefer to run the AOP Server on their own machine, especially when data can't leave the datacenter.

So if you read on, I will walk you through Setting up the AOP Server on your own Compute VM in the Oracle Cloud.  Just be sure you have already installed the AOP Sample Application, plug-ins, and Database Objects, if needed, as instructed in the Getting Started section, above.

From a Terminal connect to your Oracle Cloud VM:

ssh -i ssh_key opc@public_ip

The first thing we do, is change to the root user, as we want to install some supporting objects for AOP it will be easier to do it with the root user. Alternatively in front of every command you can add sudo.

We logged in as the OPC user, to become the ROOT user we do:

sudo su

Unlike other reporting engines, AOP software exists only out of couple of files and is installed in no time. We will download the software in the tmp folder on our machine and unpack it in /opt/aop:

cd /tmp

wget https://objectstorage.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com/n/id9u4qbhnjxj/b/apexofficeprint/o/aop_free_oracle_cloud.zip

unzip aop_free_oracle_cloud.zip -d /opt/aop

That's it!! The AOP Server is installed!



To support PDF output, AOP relies on a 3rd party converter like MS Office or LibreOffice. Here are the steps to install LibreOffice:

yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk.x86_64

yum install cups.x86_64

wget http://ftp.rz.tu-bs.de/pub/mirror/tdf/tdf-pub/libreoffice/stable/6.2.7/rpm/x86_64/LibreOffice_6.2.7_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz

tar -xvf LibreOffice_6.2.7_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz

cd /tmp/LibreOffice_6.2.7.1_Linux_x86-64_rpm/RPMS/

yum localinstall *.rpm

ln -s /opt/libreoffice6.2/program/soffice /usr/sbin/soffice

LibreOffice is installed. To see if everything is fine you can run "soffice --version" and you should see something like this:



AOP comes with a built-in web server. When you start AOP you can define the port where AOP will listen to incoming requests. The default port is 8010. We will need to tell Linux this port can handle HTTP and HTTPS requests.

semanage port -a -t http_port_t  -p tcp 8010

To start AOP on the default port do:

cd /
./opt/aop/v19.2.3/server/APEXOfficePrintLinux64 --enable_printlog &

You should see something like this:



Yay!! AOP is running.

AOP comes with a cool Web Editor, we will make this Editor available on our domain dgielis.com/aop/. In order to do that, we will adapt Nginx to also be a reverse proxy for the AOP Web Editor. 
Here we go; 

vi  /etc/nginx/conf.d/dgielis.com.conf

And add following section:

  location /aop/ {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8010/;
  }

The server part of the config file becomes:



We need to reload Nginx:

nginx -s reload

And now when we go in a browser to dgielis.com/aop/ we see the AOP Web Editor:



You can now, for example, load a sample by clicking the "Load sample" button and select PDF.
Scroll down a bit lower and click the Process button and a PDF is being generated :)



The Web Editor is built in React.js and you can drag-drop your template and add some data to test the features of AOP. There's also a Logging tab (toggle between Editor and Logging), so you can see incoming requests, results and debug output in case of errors.


Now if we want to tell our Oracle APEX apps to use our own AOP Server, the only thing we have to do is change the AOP URL.

In your Oracle APEX app, go to Shared Components > Component Settings > APEX Office Print (AOP) and change the AOP URL to the URL of your own Compute VM:


That's it! You are all set to print and export data within your own environment :)

I would recommend looking at the AOP Sample App which you installed in the last step if you followed the Getting Started wizard. It will show over 500 examples how to use AOP and its features!

Now I hope you enough knowledge so that you can please your customers with nice looking PDF, Excels and other documents in the format they want.


In the next post we will add an Object Storage to our Always Free Oracle Cloud Plan so we have a place to store files and backups.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

In this blog post we will configure a web server on our Compute VM Instance. This allows us to host some websites and have a custom URL for our Oracle APEX instance and applications.

Lets start with connecting to our VM:

From a Terminal connect to your Oracle Cloud VM:

ssh -i ssh_key opc@public_ip

The first thing we do, is change to the root user, as we want to install a web server it will be easier to do it with the root user. Alternatively in front of every command you can add sudo.

We logged in as the OPC user, to become the ROOT user we do:

sudo su

Although it doesn't really have anything to do with setting up a web server, I do want to share this... The first thing I always like to do on a machine, is get the system updated, so all latest software is being used. To do this, run following command:

yum update

It will take some time the first time, but after a couple of minutes you should see that all packages were updated:

So the purpose of this post was to install a web server so when we type in a certain domain, it will arrive at our machine. As web server, I typically chose between Apache and Nginx. Which one to choose is a hard one... if you search Google for "Apache vs Nginx" you can start reading ;) Since last year I started to use Nginx for all my new systems, before I always used Apache.

Following steps show how you install the Nginx web server and run it:

yum install nginx


Now we need to start the web server:

systemctl start nginx

To see if Nginx is successfully running, do:

systemctl status nginx

You should see something like:


The next thing we have to do is open the firewall on the Linux box, so incoming connections are allowed. The first line will open HTTP, the second HTTPS and then we reload the firewall:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
firewall-cmd --reload

Opening the firewall on the Linux box is not enough. Oracle added some extra security layers around the VM (Compute Instance). We have to allow HTTP and HTTPS access to our machine in the Oracle Firewall too.

Click the Virtual Cloud Network link:


Click the Security Links:


And add two Ingress Rules, one for HTTP and one for HTTPS:


As Source add 0.0.0.0/0 so everything can connect to it and as destination port you specify the first time 80 (for HTTP) and the second time 443 (for HTTPS):


Once both Ingress Rules are added, your list looks like this:


Now you can navigate in a browser to your Public IP and you should see:


Now that we have a web server running and it's accessible through the IP address, we know things are working. Most of the time however you don't want to access your server through an IP address, rather you want people to use a domain name. To access my Free Oracle Cloud server for example I want to use the dgielis.com domain.

The first step to do, is in the domain provider you specify for the A record, the IP address of your Oracle Cloud VM (Compute) Instance.  I typically also setup some CNAME so any sub-domain will work too. For example I could point apex.dgielis.com to Oracle APEX Builder.


Now that the domain points to our VM, we have to make sure our web server listens to this domain and knows what to do. We will need to configure Nginx for this dgielis.com domain.

Here are the steps to do this (do this in your Terminal which is connected to your VM):

vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/dgielis.com.conf

# Add following to the file (change dgielis.com by your domain):
server {
    listen         80;
    listen         [::]:80;
    server_name    dgielis.com www.dgielis.com;
    root           /usr/share/nginx/html/dgielis.com;
    index          index.html;
    try_files $uri /index.html;
}

# Create a directory where your website resides:
mkdir /usr/share/nginx/html/dgielis.com

# Add an index.html file to the directory
# Quickest way is vi or cp an index.html in this folder
# Or develop your site locally first and when ready upload with scp
# scp -i .ssh/oraclecloud /Users/dgielis/site.zip opc@132.145.215.55:/tmp

# to test Nginx configuration
nginx -t 

# to restart Nginx
nginx -s reload

# note: in case nginx doesn't restart, kill the nginx process and try to restart again
ps -ef | grep nginx
kill ~pid~

When you go in your browser to your domain name, it should show your website!

This website runs over HTTP, but these days it's recommended to use HTTPS for your sites. Lets setup HTTPS for our website by using LetsEncrypt, a free service for SSL certificates.

First we have to install some supporting packages:

yum install certbot python2-certbot-nginx  # not necessary
yum install python27-python-pip
scl enable python27 bash
pip install certbot
pip install setuptools --upgrade
pip install certbot-nginx

Once the supporting packages are there, we can run certbot to setup the SSL certificates for our domain:

certbot --nginx

After completion of the wizard, you should see something like below:


During the Certbot wizard which configures LetsEncrypt, it asks if you want to redirect all HTTP access to HTTPS and I would answer Yes here.


Now, regardless if you use HTTP or HTTPS on dgielis.com, you will always end-up with HTTPS.
HTTPS is better for Google, better for security, so no reason not to do it :)



If we want to use our Nginx web server as reverse proxy for our APEX environment we can do that by adapting our /etc/nginx/conf.d/dgielis.com.conf file (see the location sections):

vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/dgielis.com.conf

Add following to the server:

  location /ords/ {
    proxy_pass your_apex_url/ords/;
    proxy_set_header Origin "" ;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host:$server_port;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_connect_timeout       600;
    proxy_send_timeout          600;
    proxy_read_timeout          600;
    send_timeout                600;
  }

  location /i/ {
    proxy_pass your_apex_url/i/;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  }

The final configuration file looks like this:


There's one other configuration change I would suggest you do straightaway; increase the size of the max_body_size in Nginx. Add following line to nginx.conf

vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf


Test and reload the configuration of Nginx:

nginx -t
nginx -s reload

When going in a browser to https://dgielis.com/ords/ we arrive at Oracle APEX:


There's a lot of optimisation we can do on the reverse proxy. To gain performance we can put the images folder of APEX on the Nginx server, as Nginx is super fast in transferring static files. We can add more redirects, for example that apex.dgielis.com goes to the APEX builder and app.dgielis.com goes to one of our custom APEX apps. As this post is already long, I'm not including that in here.

Once Oracle provides vanity urls, we don't need to do the above, and the URL will point directly to ATP.

In the next post we will use this server to add an on-premises version of APEX Office Print (AOP), so we have everything we need to export data from the database in the format we want, for example in Excel and PDF.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

In this post we will setup a virtual machine with Oracle Linux. If you need a machine in the Cloud, this service is for you... and you can't beat the price, it's FREE!

So why would you need a machine in the Cloud? For anything that you do on your own machine, you can do on your machine in the cloud. You can work with co-workers on the same app, test applications, host some PHP app or Wordpress blog or you name it. You have a full Oracle Linux machine where you can do whatever you want.

So lets get started to setup this machine, but first lets do one step on our own machine, as it's a pre-requisite to get started: create an SSH key pair. In the link you find how you create a keypair on Windows, Linux and OSX. You can see your SSH key pair as a more secure way to enter your machine in the cloud than a username/password.

As I'm on OSX here's the command I use:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -b 2048 -C "oraclecloud2019" -f oraclecloud2019


This will generate two files:


Now you are all set to setup your VM instance in the Oracle Cloud.

When you login to your Oracle Cloud account, select the Create a VM instance:


Give your instance a name:


When you scroll down, you see the section where you have to upload the SSH key file with the name .pub:


Hit the Create button and you are done... You will see the orange icon on the left stating it's being orange provisioned:


Once the provisioning is done the icon on the left will turn green and it's ready to be used:


In case you don't want to wait for the provisioning, you can always come back later by clicking the left top hamburger icon, and in the Compute section click on Instances:


You will get an overview of your instances, see the status and go to the details from there:


Now if you want to connect to your VM in the Oracle Cloud you can use Putty (Windows) or SSH (Linux, OSX). The command looks like this:

ssh -i ssh_key opc@public_ip

The OPC user is the one you use to connect to an Oracle Compute (VM) Instance.

In the following screenshot you see me connecting to my Oracle Cloud VM (for security reasons I used another ssh key, normally it would have been oraclecloud2019 but as I exposed that with my screenshot I setup another one):


There you go, now you have a full system running in the Cloud. In the next post we will setup a webserver on this machine and configure a custom domain.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

Login to your Oracle Cloud Account. Once in, navigate on the left hamburger icon to Autonomous Transaction Processing and select the Autonomous Database. In the overview screen click the Service Console:


Make sure you allow pop-ups as it opens a new tab.
You will get a graphical overview, in here you want to click on the Development link.


There you find the link to Oracle APEX:


When you click the link the first time, it might take a bit of time as APEX is being configured behind the scenes. You first enter your cloud account password.


As it recognises you are logging in the first time, it will prompt you if you want to create a new Workspace. A Workspace is a space where your Oracle APEX applications live.

Click the button and it will prompt to create the Workspace.


Hit the Create Workspace button and you are good to go :)


As you might not click the Create Workspace the first time, I also want to show you how to create a new Workspace moving on.

When you click the Oracle APEX link in the Development dashboard again, it recognises Oracle APEX is already setup and it will prompt you in which workspace you want to login to. You want to login into the INTERNAL workspace with the ADMIN user and your cloud account password (same credentials as with SQL Developer Web).


You will arrive in the Instance Administration screen. Compared to the on-premises version of Oracle APEX, the functionality is a bit more limited as the Oracle Autonomous Database is pre-configured and managed by Oracle. So you can't tinker, for example, with the Security settings or provisioning of workspaces.


The first thing you want to do is create a new Workspace, a place where you will build your Oracle APEX app. In the Manage Workspaces menu, click on Create Workspace:


A modal dialog will appear where you can enter a new or existing database user, password and workspace name. In the following screenshot I want Oracle APEX to create a new database user called CLOUD linked to the workspace CLOUD.


Once that is provisioned, you can sign-out of the INTERNAL workspace, and sign-in to the new created workspace. As workspace name you enter the one you created above, username is the database user and the password is the one you provided when creating the workspace.


And voila... we are in Oracle APEX and we can start to create our APEX applications.



I'm not adding all screenshots to create a first Oracle APEX app in this blog post, but if you are new to APEX and want to see step by step how to start, check out the Oracle APEX Tutorial on YouTube by Caleb Curry. In the next video he walks you how to create an APEX app from a File.


There's one thing that is important when you are using the Oracle Cloud and want to do REST requests: only HTTPS requests are allowed, so make sure you always use https.

The same counts if you want to use APEX Office Print in the free Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud to export the data in the format you want (PDF, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, HTML, ...), use the HTTPS url https://api.apexofficeprint.com or the HTTPS url of your own environment.
Another thing to know is that you can't send emails out of the Free Oracle ATP Cloud with apex_mail. In case you need to send out email, I would recommend to integrate your Oracle APEX app with Mailgun, MailChimp or others.
In the post we configured Oracle APEX, so we can create our APEX apps. One of the things many people want to do is to setup a custom domain, so for example mydomain.com links to an APEX app. Oracle calls this 'vanity URLs', but that is not yet available, but coming very soon. But, no worries, you can actually already do a custom URL :) In the next post I will talk about setting up a Compute instance in the free Oracle Cloud, which makes our APEX hosting more complete, so we can have an on-premises AOP install, a web server to support custom urls etc.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

Login to your Oracle Cloud Account. Once in, navigate on the left hamburger icon to Autonomous Transaction Processing and select the Autonomous Database. In the overview screen click the Service Console:


Make sure you allow pop-ups as it opens a new tab.
You will get a graphical overview, in here you want to click on the Development link.


There you find the link to SQL Developer Web:


You can login with the same credentials as in SQL Developer (Desktop). Username: admin and your cloud account password.


Then you arrive at SQL Developer Web. The first time you login you get an introduction tour so you get used to the interface, but it's very similar to the SQL Developer Desktop version.


You might think why would I use SQL Developer Web? I sometimes don't have access to the database machine directly, but I have access to Oracle APEX interface. I use the SQL Workshop there, but if I had SQL Developer Web I would use that. So any customer in the cloud, I could use SQL Developer Web in case I need access to the database, but they don't allow direct connection :)
At Oracle Open World (OOW) I also heard that SQL Developer Web will ship with ORDS 19.3, so at that time we can use this nice interface on-premises too.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.
In the previous post we setup our Oracle database in the Free Autonomous Oracle Database Cloud.Now we want to connect to this database from our machine with SQL Developer.
Login to your Oracle Cloud Account. In case you forgot the link, you can always go back to your emails and in the "Your Oracle Cloud Account is Fully Provisioned" you find a button to Sign in.
Typically it's in this format: console.DATA_CENTER_YOU_PICKED.oraclecloud.com/?tenant=YOUR_CLOUD_ACCOUNT?provider=OracleIdentityCloudService.So in my case this is: https://console.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com/?tenant=dimi&provider=OracleIdentityCloudService
Once in, navigate on the left hamburger icon to Autonomous Transaction Processing and select the Autonomous Database (see previous blog post - last two screenshots). In the overview screen click the DB Connection button.

A modal dialog appears to download the credentials (wallet). Click the Download button:


The modal dialog changes and you need to enter a password and hit download:


Now we will make a new connection in SQL Developer. Right click on the Oracle Connections and click the New Connection... link:


Enter a name of your choice. In the User Info section as Username you enter admin and as paswoord, the paswoord you entered when you setup your database (previous blog post).
Select for Connection Type Cloud Wallet. A details section will open where you can select the file you downloaded before in the Configuration File.


Hit the Test button and see if you receive a Success message. Once fine, you can save and connect.
The admin user is a special user in the Oracle Cloud. You can see it as the sys/system user, with many of the same rights. So you can query for example dba_users to see all the users/schemas in the database:

So now you are all set to play with your database. You can setup new users, create tables, load and query data etc.

In this post we saw how to connect from SQL Developer Desktop version to the Oracle Cloud Database. In the next post I will show how to connect with SQL Developer Web, a webbased alternative to SQL Developer (Desktop).

I really have to write about the Oracle Cloud Free Tier as it's the third time in my career I've been blown away by Oracle.

The first time was when I first saw and worked with the Oracle Database, the second time when I saw HTMLDB (now APEX) and today, again, with the announcement of the Free Autonomous Oracle Cloud.

The Free Oracle Tier is a hardcore smackdown on any other cloud offering which includes a virtual machine, database and development environment!



The Free Oracle Cloud was announced by Andy Mendelsohn at Oracle Open World 2019.
You get a free Oracle Autonomous Database, 2 Virtual Machines (Compute), Storage and other services:



There's nothing like this Oracle offering on the market. The best database in the world, running on amazing hardware and all of this for free. This is not just for APEX Developers, this is for anybody who wants a datastore or virtual machine in the cloud without wanting to manage things themselves.

Jon, from JMJ Cloud, wrote RIP Exadata Express, where do I run my RAD stack now?, the answer today for me is in the Free Oracle Autonomous Oracle Cloud. For many of my customers I also used the Exadata Express service before, as it was ideal to start developing new Oracle APEX apps. The Free Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud is a better version of what Exadata Express has ever been. I would always start my development in this new free Oracle Cloud offering as it allows you to scale up while you grow.

I really believe everybody should sign-up for this service. As with every new service, the beginning might have some hickups, but to me it's worth starting with this service straight away.

I signed up for the Free Oracle Cloud  in multiple regions, and love it so far.
So I thought to write a series of blog posts on how you can get started (links will be updated while articles are published):

1. Sign-up for Free Oracle Cloud
2. Setup Autonomous Transaction Cloud (ATP)
3. Connecting with SQL Developer (Desktop) to ATP
4. Connecting with SQL Developer Web to ATP
5. Setup APEX in ATP and create first APEX app
6. Create a Virtual Machine
7. Setup a Webserver on the Virtual Machine
8. Setup APEX Office Print (AOP) On-premises on the VM
9. Connecting ATP to VM
10. Connecting VM to ATP
11. Final steps: never let the service expire

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.
In step 1 we signed-up for the Free Oracle Cloud. Once we receive the email that everything is setup, after logging in you will see in the Oracle Cloud dashboard an "Always Free Eligible" box.In this post we will create our first FREE Oracle Autonomous Transaction Database.
Login to the Oracle Cloud:

Click the Create a database link.

Give the database a name and select the type of workload you want to create. In most Oracle APEX projects I believe Transaction Processing is the one to go with:


Scrolling down on the page will show the Always Free switch, make sure to enable that :)
Further down you will need to provide some credentials that you will use to login later on.


Hit the Create Autonomous Database button and you will receive a detail screen that the provisioning has started:


You can now navigate to other parts of the Oracle Cloud. You will also receive an email when the provisioning is complete:

In the navigation (hamburger icon top left) click on the Autonomous Transaction Processing link and you will see the dashboard of the Autonomous Databases you have:
Once it's available you can click on it and see all details:


In the next post we will connect to our new Free Oracle Autonomous Database.

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

To get started, go to https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ and click the Start for free button:


Follow the wizard to sign up for the Oracle Cloud Program:


When you enter your Account details, it's important to point out that your Home Region is really important. It's only in your Home Region that you can get the Free Oracle Cloud service.
I would select the Home Region based on where most of your visiters/customers and yourself are based. Also provide correct information about yourself and a valid phone number.


You will get a notification on your phone to continue:


Provide a password:


Enter your payment information. It's important to add a valid credit card in order to get the Free Oracle Cloud, if you don't you enter in Trial mode.


Your credit card is not being charged (well for 1 USD to test the card), but it's important to have the credit card as Oracle sees your account as a Paid account and it will open more functionality :)


That's it - your account is now being created...


I setup a couple of Free Oracle Cloud services and in most instances the account is created within a minute, and you get redirected to the sign in form:


When signing in you will see the Oracle Cloud dashboard. Note that in the following screenshot, the Free Oracle Cloud Tier is not ready yet.


You will receive a welcome email.


And a few minutes later you will receive a message you are all set, and your FREE Oracle Cloud account should be ready to be selected.


But sometimes, the account is not created straightaway and you need to wait a bit. In a few cases I had to wait a few hours for the email, but at the end it always worked for me. It might be because I used this service when it was just released and maybe some datacenters weren't 100% ready yet.


In the next post we will setup a free Autonomous Database (ATP).

I’m very excited to be attending my 3rd UKOUG Conference, this year re-badged as Techfest19. The fact it’s being held in Brighton is a little disconcerting for a Crystal Palace fan, but really looking forward nonetheless to what has always been one of the very best Oracle conferences on the yearly calendar. I have a […]

I’ve very excited to announce the next series of Oracle “Let’s Talk Database” events to be run throughout Australia and New Zealand in October 2019. I’ll be discussing two exciting topics this series, “Oracle Database 19c New Features” and “Oracle Exadata X8“. As always, these sessions run between 9am-1pm, include a networking lunch and are free, […]

In Part I, we explored some options that Oracle might adopt when ordering the columns within an Automatic Index by default, in the absence of other factors where there is only the one SQL statement to be concerned with. A point worth making is that if all columns of an index are specified within SQL […]

It’s with great excitement that I announce I’ll finally be returning to London, UK in March 2020 to run both of my highly acclaimed seminars. The dates and registration links are as follows: 23-24 March 2020: “Oracle Indexing Internals and Best Practices” seminar – Tickets and Registration Link 25-26 March 2020: “Oracle Performance Diagnostics and […]