Given that we have a database in Amazon RDS and Oracle PaaS we can go through some books from Oracle Press and see if anything breaks running through a book. Let’s start with something simple, Oracle Database 12c SQL by Jason Price, published by Oracle Press. This is an introductory book that goes through the basic data types, sql commands, and an introduction of XML at the end of the book. The material should be relatively straightforward and not have any issues or problems executing the sample code. The sample code can be downloaded from Oracle Press Books by searching for the book title and downloading the Chapter 1 sample code. This will give us a way to load a table with data and execute code against the table. We will use SQL Developer to execute the code from d:\workshops\sql books\SQL and see what works and what does not work.
To get started, we need to use our Amazon RDS instance and SQL Developer that we installed yesterday. We connect with the user oracle to port 1521 after opening up the port to anyone. From this connection we can execute sql code in the main part of the SQL Developer window and load the sample code to execute. We can test the connection with the following command
select sysdate from dual;
we can follow along the book and create the user store, load the schema into the database, and look at the examples throughout the book.
Everything worked on Amazon RDS. We were able to create users, grant them audit functionality, execute XML code, and generally do everything listed in the book. The audit did not report back as expected but this could have been a user error. According to the Amazon RDS Documentation audting should work. We might not have had something set properly to report back the right information.
In summary, the Amazon RDS is a good platform to learn how to program 12c SQL and the various user level commands. If you go through a book like Oracle Database 12c SQL everything should work. This or the Oracle PaaS equivalent make an excellent sandbox that you can use for a day or two and turn off minimizing your cost of experimenting.