Earlier this week, Oracle updated Oracle Database Free from 23.4 to 23.5 (for Linux). Naturally, gvenzl/oracle-free now also offers 23.5 images. As usual, the slim, latest, full and 23-slim, 23-latest, 23-full have all moved forward to 23.5. So, for those of you who have already used one of these tags, congrats, your integration tests are already running on 23.5.
One change this update brings is that the 23.2 and 23.3 images are now deprecated, meaning that I will no longer update them unless there is something significantly wrong. Oracle Database Free 23.2 was released over a year ago and is considered end-of-life by Oracle. The same is true for 23.3 and 23.4.
A side effect of this decision was that building these images takes time and as newer versions of Oracle Database Free get released, there is not much time during the weekend anymore to rebuild them all on one laptop.
I will continue this trend of only supporting the last two versions of Oracle Database 23ai Free as new versions are released.
The 23.4 image will now also print the following notice and I recommend upgrading your CI/CD pipelines and containers to 23.5 at your earliest convenience:
#################################################
NOTICE: YOU ARE USING AN OLD IMAGE VERSION 23.4!
PLEASE CONSIDER UPGRADING TO THE LATEST VERSION!
#################################################
Meanwhile, I was able to resolve the buildah issue I encountered several months ago and the faststart images are now once again based on the layers of the non-faststart image.
There is not much left to say, other than the easiest way to get a brand new Oracle Database 23ai Free image via docker / podman is:
podman run -d --name 23ai -p 1521:1521 -e ORACLE_RANDOM_PASSWORD=y -e APP_USER=vector -e APP_USER_PASSWORD=vector gvenzl/oracle-free:slim
Have fun, and, as always, thanks for using these images! 🙂
