Rittman Mead Blog

Detecting & Masking Personal Identifiable Information: Using OCI Language Model & Oracle Analytics

Why is personal information identification a big deal? Personal Information Identification (PII) is crucial for maintaining privacy, complying with regulations, mitigating risks, ensuring data quality, and enabling trust between organisations and their customers. In recent years, numerous organisations worldwide have encountered legal issues due to breaches of PII. Notable incidents

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | How to Publish APEX (PWA) to the Google Play Store

Enhance the reach of your Oracle APEX Progressive Web App (PWA) by publishing it on the Google Play Store. Ensure your app meets PWA requirements, set up a Google Developer Account, and use PWABuilder to package your app for Android. PWABuilder simplifies converting PWAs into platform-specific apps, making them available

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | Quick CSV Data Analysis with Python and Pandas

If you have a CSV file and quickly need to do a bit of analysis on it, you do not always have to reach for the big guns like loading it into a relational database table or using Apache Spark. The Pandas Python library allows for quick analysis without the

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | Connect to Public ADB Without a Wallet

When connecting to a publicly available Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) it requires a mutual transport layer (mTLS) to establish a mutual authentication between the cloud database instance and your client application, ensuring an encrypted and secure connection. This is achieved by using a shared wallet, that contains the certificate needed

oci

Updating the Docker Image on the RStudio Terraform Template

In my previous blog post I wrote about deploying R Studio in a container on OCI. If you remember, I mentioned that the terraform template in OCI creates a compute instance with a docker container running R version 4.1.1, released on 2021/08/10. The terraform template can

oci

OCI Data Flow: ETL with Apache Spark in the Cloud

About OCI Data Flow Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Flow is a managed service for running Apache Spark applications, promising simplified infrastructure management, development, and deployment. Initial impressions suggest it delivers on this promise, showcasing an elegant approach to certain tasks. To assess OCI Data Flow's capabilities, a

GenAI

Oracle Powered RAG - Revisiting our Chatbot

Back in March, we demonstrated a chatbot that uses RAG to allow users to query the content of our blog using natural language. It made use of OpenAI’s API to access their embedding models and the GPT 3.5 turbo Large Language Model (LLM), and used Weaviate as the

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | Set Dates and Times in Autonomous DB and APEX

As you might know, Autonomous Databases are set to the UTC time zone by default. While you can alter this setting to match your preferred time zone, it may not always be convenient to do so. Instead, you can use the following tips to properly handle times both in the

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | Reverse Engineering Tables in Oracle ODI

When you are reverse engineering tables in Oracle ODI, especially from large systems like EBS, you can hit an issue where the reverse engineering operation is successful but the table you import has no columns. This is caused by the access you have to the source system. If you are

data visualization

Data Visualisation Best Practices in Oracle Analytics

Best practices are like a good guidebook that helps anyone work with a tool with ease. Industry standards in general provide what we should do and how we should do it and these are generally advice that comes from experts that have been time tested over a period of time.

OpenAI

OpenAI Gives Vision to Oracle DB, Part 2: Analysing Image Data with GPT-4o

The Context In my last blog post, we successfully loaded image data into an Oracle database table. Now, we will focus on building an Oracle function to connect this data with the OpenAI GPT-4o model for analysis. We will adapt the framework from a previous blog post where we used

OpenAI

OpenAI Gives Vision to Oracle DB, Part 1: Preparing the Image Data

Image Data in Oracle DB OpenAI's newly released GPT-4o model, with its ground-breaking multimodal processing capabilities, has generated significant interest in the AI community. Building on my previous exploration of integrating OpenAI's text-based models with Oracle database queries, this series of articles will delve into utilizing

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | Use Python For Querying JSON Files

JSON files are prevalent in the IT industry, commonly used in web service API data exchange. Python offers a streamlined alternative to manual analysis or database importation, often proving as efficient and concise as SQL queries. Let us have a look at an example of a JSON file that consists

OpenAI

Call OpenAI from Oracle Query

Introduction The Old meets the New ChatGPT's impact on our daily lives has been surprisingly significant in the short time since its release. Reshaping work practices, OpenAI's ChatGPT is expected to drive further change, even disruption in the coming years. Meanwhile, relational databases, the workhorses of

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | Destroy An OCI Stack Before Deleting It

Creating a stack in OCI will also create a range of underlying resources needed to support the stack. If you no longer require the stack it's important that you clean up all of the associated resources as well as deleting the stack. Deleting unused resources can save you

APEX

Oracle APEX - Understanding Upgrades and Support

As you may already know, Oracle APEX is a fully supported, no-cost feature of the Oracle Database across all its versions, including Enterprise, Standard, and Express (XE). If you hold an Oracle Database maintenance agreement, you're covered for Oracle APEX support and eligible for patches too. Considering that

odi

Migration from Informatica PowerCenter to ODI: accelerated with Sql2Odi

Streamlining ETL Migrations with Sql2Odi I have previously blogged about Rittman Mead's Sql2Odi tool, which translates SQL statements (SELECT or WITH) into Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Mappings. After years of use, we recently put Sql2Odi to the test during a large ETL migration project. Our goal was to

data science

Deploy RStudio in an OCI Container

RStudio is a free interactive development environment or (IDE) designed specifically for the R language. It supports direct code execution, and tools for plotting, history, and debugging. It’s safe to say that almost no-one uses R without R Studio. RStudio Server is an application that provides a web based

Person typing on laptop computer with security software interface on screen

APEX

Oracle APEX - Escape Vulnerabilities

We all aim for visually appealing interfaces and accurate data in our reports. However, the reality is that sometimes our application data originates from sources beyond our control. It's risky to assume that this data is clean and trustworthy. When users input data into a web form, there&

data visualization

Two Tales of Data Storytelling

We’ve recently been focusing on how data is presented to various audiences using different methods. The audiences can vary greatly by subject knowledge and can be thought of in terms of: * Subject matter experts: These individuals have a deep understanding of the topic and want to explore the data

OCI Functions

Functions for Structured data with OCI

For data engineers working in the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers a suite of powerful functions designed to simplify data manipulation and analysis. Amongst these are three functions that stand out for their ability to handle structured data in different formats: json_table, xml_table, and the lesser-known unnest.

Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday | Python Data Type Hints

Data type hints in Python, introduced in PEP 484 and enhanced in subsequent PEPs, provide a way to specify the expected types of variables, function parameters, and return values. While Python remains dynamically typed, type hints allow developers to add optional static typing to their code for documentation, readability, and

APEX

Oracle APEX - Starting and stopping stand-alone ORDS in GNU/Linux

I have recently been working on an Oracle APEX upgrade project. As part of this upgrade, we undertook a migration that involved transitioning from the PL/SQL Gateway to Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS). Given the time gap since I last worked with on-premises systems (a non-cloud environment, if you

GenAI

RAG Chatbot Demo Video - CloudWorld 2024

In a recent blog post we gave an overview of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a way to leverage the natural language querying capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on private or proprietary stores of unstructured data. A major use case for RAG is in the creation of chatbots which

oas

Oracle Analytics Server 2024: The 10 Best Features, Ranked

Oracle recently announced the general availability of Oracle Analytics Server 2024. While it introduces 100+ new capabilities, this article is focused on the top 10 ones according to my personal opinion. If you are interested in a comprehensive list of all the new features and enhancements please refer to the