Using SQL*Plus to Seed your Dockerized Oracle Database

In my last blog, you learned  to create a containerized Oracle database for your development/testing purpose. You also know how to connect to your container and run command in the container.

Most applications require some reference data e.g. example,my  OrderApp application based on Apache Tom EE  requires catalog data to be pre-populated before I can test my application. 

One of the readers asked me how can we run a SQL script on his local or shared drive to seed the containerized database.

In this blog, I will show how you can execute scripts with SQL*Plus inside the container to seed your dockerized Oracle database.

Connecting to SQLPlus

In the last blog, we learned that ORACLE_HOME for the database running in the container is /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1.

I can connect to the database by running the following command:

docker exec -it orcldb /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/bin/sqlplus system/welcome1@ORCL

SQL*Plus: Release 12.1.0.2.0 Production on Sat Jan 20 06:22:58 2018

Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Last Successful login time: Sun Jan 14 2018 03:09:54 +00:00

Connected to:

Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production

SQL>

You might remember ORCL was the instance name that provided for my database.

Also note that when I run the command, SQL*Plus is getting executed inside the container.

Running a SQL script Using SQLPlus

As the command is getting executed inside the container running the Oracle database, the SQL script has to be accessible from the container.

My Script

My application depends upon a user in the PDB. My script creates the user, creates tables in that user's schema and populates data in those tables. 

I have a script named user.sql that I want to execute and here are the contents of /Users/dpanda/orderapp2/orcl/sql/user.sql script.

create user orderapp identified by orderapp2

default tablespace users temporary tablespace temp

/

alter user orderapp quota unlimited on users

/

grant connect, resource to orderapp

/

connect orderapp/orderapp@pdb1

@/u04/app/sql/sample_oow_tomcat_create.sql

@/u04/app/sql/sample_oow_productline.sql

commit;

exit;

As I am invoking the SQL*Plus inside the container, I have to specify the drive inside the container.

Mapping Volume from the Container to Local or Shared Drive

You might remember from the last blog that when I started the Database container, I mapped the drive in /u04/app in the container to /Users/dpanda/orderapp2/orcl by using –v option as below:

docker run -d --env-file db.properties -p 1521:1521 -p 5500:5500 --name orcldb --net appnet  --shm-size="4g" -v /Users/dpanda/orderapp2/orcl:/u04/app:/u04/app container-registry.oracle.com/database/standard

The script directory has to be specified as /u04/app/sql as my script is located in /Users/dpanda/orderapp2/orcl/sql directory on my MAC .

Here is the docker command I can use to run my script:

docker exec -it orcldb

/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/bin/sqlplus system/welcome1@PDB1 @/u04/app/sql/user

As you can see, I can connecting to the pdb1 database by executing SQLPlus command and running the user.sql script.

Here is the output you will get

SQL*Plus: Release 12.1.0.2.0 Production on Sat Jan 13 06:16:32 2018

Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Last Successful login time: Sat Jan 13 2018 06:16:19 +00:00

Connected to:

Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production

User created.

User altered.

Grant succeeded.

…..

1 row created.

1 row created.

1 row created.

Commit complete.

Disconnected from Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production

Hope this helps to automate your script to seed your containerized Oracle database.

In a future blog, I will demonstrate how can you Oracle Instant Client in a Docker container to automate your scripts.