Oracle Database 21c3 Docker Image with Reusable Volumes and Logging

[hadrabap]

Hello friends,

Lately I've decided to return back to Oracle Database and mess around a bit with it. I decided to go the Docker Image way and I've discovered a few issues with easy solution.

First of all, I'm using the database on Oracle Linux 8 in rootless Podman.

The workflow which does not play well is the following:

1. Start the image based on the official README.md with all the volumes mounted
2. Stop the container
3. Remove the container
4. Start the container once again using the step (1)
5. The database cannot start as initialization parameters files don't exist

The solution is to mount the /opt/oracle/dbs/ directory as well. This is the place where the look-up happens. When this directory is persisted by the mounted volume, the consequent containers happily finds the SPFILEs and works just fine.

Second issue is are logging and traces. All of this is located in directory structures under /opt/oracle/diag/ which is growing quite fast in size. It would be cool to let this structure volume-mounted as well. I don't have a easy solution for it now. I just manually re-created the structure with permissions in additional volume directory, mounted and now the database logs to the volume. This is quite cumbersome, but the database expects the tree structure to be present. Just for curiosity I'm attaching the structure for 21c3 image. Just run:

mkdir diag
cd diag
mkdir -p $( cat diag.dirs.txt )
cd ..
chcon -R system_u:object_r:container_file_t:s0 diag/
chmod -R g+w diag
chown -R <your_oracle_user_id>:<your_dba_grou_id> diag/

Next the podman create … should look like:

podman create … \
        … \
        -v /path/to/oradb-21c3-volumes/dbs:/opt/oracle/dbs:z \
        -v /path/to/oradb-21c3-volumes/diag:/opt/oracle/diag:z \
        …

diag.dirs.txt

Thanks and enjoy SQL!