If you haven’t already started using Oracle Cloud services, then what better way than to sign up for $300 free credits for a pay-as-you-go subscription (valid for one month)? Simply visit https://cloud.oracle.com/tryit and click Sign Up. I did it earlier – it’s really easy and was set up within an hour. To try it out, I provisioned myself a Standard Edition Database service – again, pretty easy. You can choose either a predefined set of options, or customise it to suit your needs (in terms of CPU’s, memory, database version etc). You’ll see the service in your console with a status of “Creating service…”.
After about half an hour the service provisioning is complete. You may notice that provisioning a Database service actually gives you a couple of supporting others too – you can of course provision these standalone if required.
Starting/Stopping a particular service is as easy as this:
Next was to get access via SSH. To do that you will need to generate a key pair on your client machine using ssh-keygen. Then simply copy your public key up to the client.
Now all we have to do from the client is ssh oracle@123.45.67.89 and we have standard terminal access.
This means you can then access the database using your favourite command line tool. 🙂
The final thing to do is enable the port to allow external access to APEX (this is disabled by default) using these instructions.
All done!
Definitely worth a try if you have’t already. You have to provide a credit card but you’re assured that you won’t be billed anything unless you opt to upgrade to a paid plan. If you are an enterprise looking for an Oracle database with minimal setup costs and maintenance overhead, this seems a great option.