In the Lab

Hands-on technical implementation and testing

Hybrid Analytics with Oracle 26ai and S3 Data

Oracle 26ai can join external tables backed by S3 Parquet files with regular internal tables in a single SQL statement, without data movement, ETL pipelines, or Spark. The optimizer treats S3-backed external tables as another data source and picks the right join strategy automatically. This post shows how to build a customer dimension table from […]

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HammerDB-Scale 2.0 and Why I Rebuilt the Whole Thing

I spent months building a tool that answers a question nobody else was asking: how many databases can your infrastructure actually handle before something breaks? HammerDB-Scale orchestrates parallel database benchmarks on Kubernetes, correlates application metrics with storage behaviour, and finds consolidation limits. I also overengineered it for the wrong user experience. But I thought it

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Querying Parquet Files on S3 with DBMS_CLOUD in Oracle 26ai

TL;DR: DBMS_CLOUD.CREATE_EXTERNAL_TABLE creates an external table that reads Parquet directly from S3. Define the table once, query it with standard SQL. No data loading, no ETL. With S3 connectivity working (Part 1 and Part 2), this post shows how to create DBMS_CLOUD external tables over Parquet files in S3 and query them from Oracle 26ai.

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Solving DBMS_CLOUD Connectivity with S3-Compatible Storage

TL;DR: DBMS_CLOUD fails with non-AWS S3 because it parses hostnames to select the signing algorithm and extract the AWS region. Fix: point s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com at your endpoint via DNS, add it as a SAN on the endpoint’s TLS cert, and import the cert into an Oracle wallet. Full DBMS_CLOUD functionality, no file downloads. In Part 1,

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Connecting Oracle 26ai to S3-Compatible Object Storage

TL;DR: DBMS_CLOUD requires valid HTTPS certificates with matching hostnames. Self-signed certs or HTTP-only? DBMS_CLOUD won’t work. This post shows what breaks and why. Version Note: This uses Oracle 26ai (23.26.1.0.0). SSL handling behavior changed in 23ai. On 19c/21c, sqlnet.ora settings like SSL_SERVER_DN_MATCH=NO still work, so self-signed certs may be viable with additional configuration. The steps

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Deploy, Score, and Compare Data Infrastructure on K8s with Lakebench

Finding which lakehouse architecture performs best on your infrastructure is expensive. Deploying a single stack on Kubernetes by hand takes days (ask me how I know). A different catalog, a different query engine, a different version, different resource profiles. The cost of the first deployment is high. The cost of repeating it for every permutation

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Installing Oracle Database 19c RAC on OEL 8: Four Traps

I recently built a two-node Oracle RAC 19c cluster on Oracle Linux 8.10 with Pure Storage FlashArray backend. The hardware was solid, the network was configured, the storage was presented. What should have been a straightforward installation turned into a four-hour troubleshooting session because of issues that aren’t documented in Oracle’s installation guides. This post

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