Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Race to Certification 2025 learning and certification challenge running from July 1 to October 31, 2025 offers an opportunity to earn free professional certification exam attempts for the following exam titles: AI   Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 AI Foundations Associate | 1Z0-1122-25 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Data Science Professional | 1Z0-1110-25 Oracle AI Vector Search Professional | 1Z0-184-25 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Generative AI Professional | 1Z0-1127-25 OCI  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Foundations Associate | 1Z0-1085-25 Orac...

IT consulting firm Gartner's Magic Quadrant is a tool that provides a graphical competitive positioning of technology providers in a complex and fast-evolving market.  These Magic Quadrant market research reports for different IT categories rely on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to demonstrate market trends. The Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems as of December 2023 recognizes & rates 19 companies: LEADERS Amazon Web Services Microsoft Google Oracle Alibaba Cloud MongoDB Databricks Snowflake CHALLENGERS InterSystems VISIONARIES IBM  Cloudera SAP  Teradata Redis Neo4j NICHE PLAYERS EDB Cockroach Labs Couchbase  Yugabyte 

Oracle is offering free training and certification testing on in-demand skills across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AI/ML, data management, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.  The Race to Certification Challenge includes free access to the OCI and Cloud Applications Business Process training and certifications, and two (2) free certification exam attempts valid from June 1, 2023, (12:00 a.m. GMT) through September 30, 2023 (11:59 p.m. GMT) . Digital training for OCI will be available for free continuously . Oracle’s free curriculum is available to anyone, at any skill level, across various IT roles.  The following training & exam topics will be of special interest to those beginning their Cloud journey: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2023 Foundations Associate (1Z0-1085-23) Oracle Cloud Data Management 2023 Foundations Associate (1Z0-1105-23) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2023 AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1122-23) These exams are of multiple choice format.

This Week I Learned -  * Oracle is offering free access to the OCI and Cloud Applications Business Process training and certifications , and two free certification exam attempts valid through Aug 31, 2023. * Model is a fancy word for recipe - Making Friends with Machine Learning: The Entire Course (6h:22m), Cassie Kozyrkov * Prompt engineering...differs from ChatGPT-style prompting because the prompts generated through prompt engineering are usually meant to be used repeatedly in high-volume, diverse situations in order to solve a specific problem reliably for an application. * There is also a lot of skepticism about whether prompt engineering can truly be described as "engineering" or if it's just "witchcraft" spouted by hype-chasers. -  Mitchell Hashimoto , co-founder HashiCorp * "GPT-4 is a tool, not a creature. It's easy to get confused. ... GPT-4 and systems like it are good at doing tasks, not jobs." - Sam Altman *  Sample code and notebooks...

This Week I Learned -  * A  nice interactive visual summarizing the design principles and best practices in the six conceptual areas or pillars of the Well-Architected Framework . * Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) which was launched in 2016 had a 2.6% market share in the USD500 billion cloud market in 2022, according to global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC). * Oracle was founded in 1977 and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was among its first DBMS customers.  * Oracle is the preferred vendor in banking, financial services, public sector, telecom, and manufacturing domains despite competition from its arch-rival, the German software major SAP which was founded five years before Oracle. * In 2022, Oracle and Microsoft entered into a pact for deeper integration of their clouds, helping customers use multi-cloud environments. Oracle's database users can connect directly to Microsoft's Azure cloud and have access to Microsoft tools...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure service principals vs. managed identities - Service principals and Managed identities are forms of security identity in Azure. They provide an identity to applications that access Azure resources. Both service principles and managed identities enable fine-grained, programmatic access to Azure infrastructure without having to put passwords into scripts . The key difference between Azure service principals and managed identities is that, with Managed identities, admins do not have to manage credentials, including passwords. Managed identities can be system-assigned or user-assigned . With system-assigned managed identities, admins create the identity as a part of a specific Azure resource, such as a VM. That identity shares a lifecycle with its associated resource. Meaning, when admins delete the resource, they also delete the identity. User-assigned identities, on the other hand, are not tied to a specific resource. They have their own lifecycle...

This Week I Learned -  * Upcoming  Kubernetes 1.27 is about to close a bug that is almost 6 years old . * Oracle Database 19c is fully supported in containers. And there are Helm charts for configuring these images in Kubernetes. Container images for Oracle Database 19.3 and 21.3 were recently released. *  Foundational & Advanced Machine Learning courses from Google *  FinOps  is an evolving  cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice  that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions. At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice. It’s the way for teams to manage their cloud costs, where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage supported by a central best-practices group. FinOps is a portmanteau of “Finance” and “DevOps” stressing the communications and collaboration business and engineering teams. Other names f...

This Week I Learned -  * Spring Cloud GCP version 4.0 officially supports Spring Boot 3.x. Java 17 is now a minimum requirement. * Free ebook:  Succeeding with AI - How to make AI work for your business by Veljko Krunic, Manning, 2023 * An array of new job types, functions and roles with titles like Cloud Cost Optimization Engineer, Hybrid Network Engineer, or Multi-Cloud Specialist have come into existence with the emergence of cloud technology. Current job roles which are focused on modernizing applications, migrating workloads, and other activities to get the most out of the cloud will stabilize over time, and native cloud architectures are going to become the norm leading to the need for new job functions. Google has role-based learning paths  to prepare for new roles. *  Flutter is Google’s open-source technology for creating mobile, desktop, and web apps with a single codebase. Unlike other popular solutions, Flutter is not a framework or library; i...

This Week I Learned -  *  Helidon is a Java microservice framework that is open sourced by Oracle.  *  Microsoft Azure AI  provides more than 449 prebuilt neural voices across 147 languages. Custom Neural Voice (CNV) is a feature offered by Azure AI that enables users to create a unique, customized, synthetic voice for their applications. This feature uses human speech samples as training data to generate a highly natural-sounding voice for a brand or characters. CNV which is based on neural text-to-speech technology allows creation of synthetic, realistic and natural-sounding voiced for representing brands and personifying machines for conversational interactions with users. Duolingo, the language learning company is using Custom Neural Voice to personalize language learning by introducing a cast of characters within the platform. * Azure Speech to text supports real-time language identification for multilingual language learning scenarios, and helps human-hum...

This Week I Learned -  *  Migrate application workloads written in full .NET Framework, which requires running in Windows containers to .NET Standard . Migrated workloads will run in Linux containers with a smaller footprint in terms of a container image and hence provide better density. This decreases the number of agent nodes required to host and run applications. *  Azure shared disks is a feature for Azure managed disks that allow you to attach a managed disk to multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously .  * You can attach an SSD persistent disk in multi-writer mode to up to two N2 virtual machine (VM) instances simultaneously so that both VMs can read and write to the disk. Persistent disks in multi-writer mode support a subset of SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations (SCSI PR) commands.  You can attach a non-boot persistent disk to more than one VM in read-only mode , which lets you share static data between multiple VMs. Sharing static data betw...

The following Org Chart comic was drawn by Manu Cornet and appeared in The New York Times in 2011. Cornet is a French programmer, cartoonist, writer and musician. Cornet worked at Google from 2007 until 2021. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft acknowledged the drawing thus in his book 'Hit Refresh' -"A cartoonist drew the Microsoft organization chart as warring gangs, each pointing a gun at another. The humorist's message was impossible to ignore [...] I told employees that renewing our company’s culture would be my highest priority." Popular LinkedIn contributor Alex Xu asked after how relevant is the drawing after more than 10 years and current and past employees of those companies have responded with their experiences .

Excerpts & paraphrased notes from the book  Oracle Autonomous Database for Dummies  (PDF, 83 pages) - An autonomous database is a cloud database that uses ML to eliminate the human labor associated with database tuning, security, backups, updates, and other routine management tasks.  It combines the dynamic agility of  the cloud with the intelligent responsiveness of applied, adaptive machine learning (ML).  The design goal is to make the database intelligent and self-reliant so as to minimize or eliminate human labor  — and associated human error  — and ensure data safety and optimal performance. The core attributes of Autonomous Database  — self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing . At startup, it automatically establishes a triple-mirrored scale-out configuration in one regional cloud data center, with an optional full standby copy in another region. By applying software updates in a rolling fashion across nodes of the cluster, it k...

 This Week I Learned - * SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance both run on the latest stable version of the SQL Server database engine and Windows operating system, and most users would not notice that upgrades are performed continuously. *  The Oracle CPU (OCPU) unit of measurement for x86 OCPUs is worth at least two vCPUs .  * Reading Progress is a free tool built into Microsoft Teams designed to support and track reading fluency.  Languages supported by Auto-detect can be used with Reading Progress. *  Google Cloud Shell Editor  is powered by the Eclipse Theia IDE platform and supports Go, Java, .Net, Python and NodeJS. * MapmyIndia is a digital mapping company whose data powers Apple Inc.’s Maps and Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa in India. The Okhla, Delhi-headquartered company sells its technology and geospatial information to a broad range of global brands, including Uber Technologies Inc., Mercedes-Benz, McDonald’s Corp. and e-commerce rivals Amazon a...

Microsoft Azure is an authorized cloud environment for running Oracle Database. When migrating Oracle software and workloads from on-premises to Microsoft Azure, Oracle provides license mobility. Microsoft and Oracle’s cloud interoperability partnership means you can rely on tested, validated, and supported deployments of Oracle enterprise and custom applications on Azure with Oracle databases—Real Application Clusters (RAC), Exadata, and Autonomous Database— deployed in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. [ Update - July 2022 ] - Microsoft has teamed up with Oracle to launch a new service called “Oracle Database Service for Azure.” The latest offering provides Microsoft Azure customers access to databases running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle Database Service for Azure builds on a three-year-old partnership between Microsoft and Oracle. Both companies launched an interconnect service in 11 regions back in 2019, which makes it easier for enterprises to run workloads acros...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure landing zones are the output of a multi-subscription Azure environment that accounts for scale, security, governance, networking, and identity. Azure landing zones enable application migrations and greenfield development at enterprise-scale in Azure.  * Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) is a key component in enabling enterprise Java workloads on Azure. The WLS solutions built in partnership between Oracle and Microsoft simplify migration by automating boilerplate provisioning of virtual networks and storage, installing OS/Java resources, setting up WLS, and configuring integration with key Azure services. The partnership between Oracle and Microsoft was announced in June of 2019.  * Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed service that lets you run the VMware platform in Google Cloud. VMware Engine provides you with VMware operational continuity so you can benefit from a cloud consumption model and lower your total cost of ownership....