The new Oracle 19c Hands-On Lab is available

Well, it’s been a while since we refreshed the lab being downloadable via this blog. But finally, the new Oracle 19c Hands-On Lab is available – you can download it as of now.

What’s new in the lab?

First of all, the biggest change you’ll see is that the operating system is now Oracle Linux 7. Well, to be honest, I’m not a die-hard Linux expert and you may find my setup a bit creepy. Feel free to exchange things or adjust them – or drop me a message if you think that adjustments should be made. And of course, all passwords in the entire lab are “oracle“.

Then, as usual, you will find 3 different and patched Oracle homes. The unavoidable Oracle 11.2.0.4 home has to be there. But then we had to make a decision whether we should include Oracle 12.1.0.2 or Oracle 12.2.0.1 or Oracle 18c. I decided that I would like to have 12.2.0.1 as many of my customers went already live on 12.2.0.1. Plus, 12.2.0.1 Multitenant offers already things such as relocate and hot cloning. Those things wouldn’t be there in 12.1.0.2.

In addition to the Oracle 12.2.0.1 home of course there’s an Oracle 19c home as well. Three homes – and five different databases. The usual suspects, UPGR and FTEX play the 11g part, DB12 (a non-CDB) and CDB1 are the 12.2.0.1 toys, plus a fresh CDB2 in the Oracle 19c home.

HammerDB is the load generator. And I manipulated the setup a bit to make performance look worse. This makes the tuning part of the lab a bit more colorful. Franck Pachot has done an excellent showcase already on the basis of the lab to find out what exact optimizer setting has caused this plan change. And the SQL Developer is there and configured as well of course.

The lab is not only an upgrade lab. It allows you to migrate, play with Multitenant, exercise fallback strategies, tune your database and much more. Please use it to try out things you wouldn’t want to do in your production environments.

The instructions

Since the Oracle 18c lab we put the instructions online. This is a challenge in some rare cases but it makes the maintenance and extension of the instructions much easier for us. If somebody finds an error, I can correct it within a minute – and everybody has the refreshed instructions right away. Plus, I will add more modules. There are so many things I’d like to include in the next months. And it is much easier to add something if the instructions are online.

You may start here: Oracle Database 19c Hands-On Lab Instructions

I’ll keep the instructions for the previous Oracle 18c lab online for a while for those who use the older lab. But please be aware that the download of the older lab is not available anymore. If you need an 18c home, please feel free to install it into the new lab.

Download the lab

The lab is hosted on oracle.com. We split it up into multiple zip part files of 2GB size each. When you downloaded all the files, you’ll glue them together – and then unzip it.

You may download the lab: Oracle Database 19c Hands-On Lab

Once you unzipped the entire lab, you’ll need to import the ova appliance into your Virtual Box environment. Please scroll down a bit on the download page for detailed instructions.

And before you start, make sure your systems satisfies the default requirements. Having a modern quad-core CPU and 16GB (or more) of RAM is a real benefit.

Make sure you have at least VBox 5.2 (or newer) – we’ll update the instructions. Adjust your VBox settings for the lab at first before you startup. Makes your life easier and the lab performing better on your environment.

Now it’s time – start here and have fun!

–Mike