Oracle Cloud now offers the Always Free Tier that comes with an always free Autonomous Data Warehouse (up to 20 GB data storage) as well as an free Autonomous Database for Transaction Processing. In an earlier article, I described how to provision your own Free Autonomous Data Warehouse in Oracle Cloud (in 10 minutes and a little bit). A second article shows how to connect desktop based SQL Developer to the cloud based ADW or ATP instance. In this article, I will show how to connect the desktop tool Oracle Data Visualization for Desktop (the local counterpart to Oracle Analytics Cloud) to the always free Autonomous Data Warehouse instance. (note: connecting to a trial or paid for instance works in exactly the same way).
Oracle Data Visualization for Desktop is a tool you can download from OTN and run locally. It falls under the OTN license, which means that for evaluation and training purposes, you can work with the tool for free.
As a prerequisite, you should download the Client Credentials Wallet for the ADW or ATP instance. You can do so from the OCI Dashboard | Autonomous Database | <Database Instance Dashboard>
Click on Download, provide the password for user admin and download the zip-file:
Next, run Oracle Data Visualization for Desktop:
On the Home Page, click on Create
Select Connection in the popup palet:
Next, select Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud:
The Create Connection dialog appears. Provide the following details:
- Connection Name
- Description
- Host (learn this from the tnsnames.ora file in the client credentials wallet)
- Port (probably 1522, learn this from the tnsnames.ora file in the client credentials wallet)
- Client Credentials – extract the cwallet.sso file from the client credentials wallet and select this file
- Username – for example admin or some other database user in the ADW instance
- Password – password for the ADW user
- Service Name (learn this from the tnsnames.ora file in the client credentials wallet)
The contents of the Client Credentials Wallet for the ADW instance and specifically the contents of the tnsnames.ora file (which includes host, port, service name)
Click on Save. The tool will now validate the data provided. Hopefully you will get:
After this success indicator, we can start the creation of data sets based on tables in this ADW instance.
For example: click on create and select Data Set:
Now select the Connection to the ADW instance:
A list of schemas is shown and after selecting the SH schema, we can select the table to base the Data Set on:
This means the Data Visualization Desktop tool [in this case running on my laptop] can work with the data in our always free ADW instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Enough for now. Good luck!
