I have quite many different databases and would like to log in to them from my linux box using my AD username and password. Creating tnsnames.ora aliases for all of them is too much work, I’d like to just specify hostname and service from command line.

Bash aliases to the rescue, but simple alias is not enough in this case, so just take it as an example how can more complex aliases be created in Bash.

Just copy these functions to $HOME/.bashrc, modify them according to your needs and done 🙂

This creates two “aliases” – sqls for secure database connection and sql for insecure. I also need to use instantclient driver for database connection (Radius authentication).

Usage:

sqls rac-scan.example.com myapplicationservice.prod
sqls rac-scan.example.com myapplicationservice.prod dbauser
SQLS_OPTS="-verbose" sqls rac-scan.example.com myapplicationservice.prod

So your RAC database hangs/has occasional stalls/you want to do an emergency reboot?
Franck Pachot has written a good article what traces to get for troubleshooting or for Oracle support

I had a problem – all RAC instances seem to “stall” occasionally so I wanted to execute Francks script on all instances at the same time when the problem was happening.

Ansible to the rescue.

First I pushed out the following script to all instances, this script actually does the diagnostics dump.

Then the Ansible playbook to execute the script above on all instances at the same time and afterwards download all traces to your local ansible controller host: