Getting started with Oracle Database in a Docker container!

One of the benefits of using Docker is quick and easy provisioning. I wanted to find out first-hand if this could help me get an Oracle Enterprise Edition database quickly up and running for use in a development environment. Oracle provides Docker images for its Standard and Enterprise Edition database in the Oracle Container Registry. Lucas Jellema has already provided two blogs on this (here and here) which have been a useful starting point. In this blog I'll describe some of the choices to make and challenges I encountered. To summarize, I'm quite happy with the Docker images in the registry as they provide a very easy way to automate the install of an EE database. You can find a Vagrant provisioning shell script with the installation of Docker and Docker commands to execute here and a description on how to use it here.

10 reasons NOT to implement Blockchain now

A secure distributed ledger with smart contract capabilities not requiring a bank as an intermediary! Also a single source of truth with complete traceability. Definitely something we want! Blockchain technology promises to make this possible. Blockchain became famous through cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The technology could also be considered to replace B2B functionality. With new technologies it is not a bad idea to look at pro's and con's before starting an implementation. Blockchain is the new kid on the block and there is not much experience yet on how well he will play with others and will mature. In this blog I summarize some of my concerns concerning blockchain of which I hope will be solved in due time.

Regarding new/emerging technologies in the integration space, I'm quite open to investigate the potential value which they can offer. I'm a great proponent of for example Kafka, the highly scalable streaming platform and Docker to host microservices. However, I've been to several conferences and did some research online regarding blockchain and I'm sceptical. I definitely don't claim to be an expert on this subject so please correct me if I'm wrong! Also, this is my personal opinion. It might deviate from my employers and customers views.

Most of the issues discussed here are valid for public blockchains. Private blockchains are of course more flexible since they can be managed by companies themselves. You can for example more easily migrate private blockchains to a new blockchain technology or fix issues with broken smart contracts. These do require management tooling, scripts and enough developers / operations people around your private blockchain though. I don't think it is a deploy and go solution just yet.