As always, the complete, official list of enhancements and fixes can be found here. Contained in this brief post are some of the highlights from this latest release.
My top enhancements
Of the new features the team has published, I’d say these next two are probably going to be the “most sought after” for folks.
Managed service connections
In short, you can now use either Instance Principal and OCI Profile credentials for the db.connectionType in your ORDS configuration settings. Details can be found here.
My takeaways from this:
- It is going to make credential storage a LOT easier
- Use Instance Principal for when you are using a VM to host ORDS in OCI, and OCI Profile for all else (easy way to look at this without getting too complicated)
I am working on a tutorial for this, using the OCI Profile method. Once I’m back from traveling, I’ll publish on the official Oracle blog site.
JWT Profile at the pool level
The elevator pitch for this: “You know how you could only set a JWT profile for a schema? Well this makes it possible to set this profile at the pool level, for all consumers (schemas) of that pool.” Meaning, this makes it optional, should you want to “share” a JWT Profile across schemas. Details can be found here. Expect an official tutorial soon.
Pre-Authenticated Requests (PARs)
ORDS recently introduced support for Pre-Authenticated Requests (PARs). Well, we now have updates in the SQL Developer Web UI. You can create PARs from within the Resource Handler Dashboard. You can revoke PARs too.
SQL Developer Web UI
Creating a new PAR
Creating a new PAR from an existing Resource Handler is fairly effortless now. After creating the PAR, you’ll be provided a Token, Alias, and complete PAR URI. You’ll see how the URI is a concatenation of the existing URI and the PAR token. But what if you want to revoke access?
Revoking a PAR
PARs are automatically revoked when they expire. You can alternatively revoke the PAR:
- In the PAR dashboard, or
- From within the same Resource Handler dashboard
PAR Expiration by Alias function
We have introduced a new function that will ingest the PAR alias, and return the time left till expiration. You can find this new function under the ORDS_PAR package of the ORDS_METADATA schema.
I’d like to know, how would you use this though? Would you use this in some sort of automation, or would you somehow display the remaining time on screen (if we are talking about a client application)?
MLE/JS
Now, when a Resource Handler has anything to do with MLE and you encounter an MLE error, you’ll receive a message with a callout to MLE.
Exception handling
In the example below, I’ve created a simple MLE/JS Resource Handler that should display some details about a specified employee (identified by their employee number). However, since this test schema has zero objects in it, I’d expect to receive an error.
In the example below, I use a random employee number, for a non-existent “employees” table. And to truly see the benefits, you’ll want to have the ORDS printDebugToScreen configuration setting set to TRUE.
ORDS CLI
Verify command
I cannot tell you how many times people ask questions that can be answered with this one command.
On its face, it seems trivial, but this is such a nice shortcut to determining if an ORDS installation is valid. I can see this being used in your shell scripts too, for validation. Something like:
sed 'ords config --db-pool default verify'Or perhaps, add it to the compose.yaml file that we include in our ORDS container?
Other/Misc
Want to share your story?
If you’ve stopped by the ORDS product page recently, then you may have seen our latest customer testimonial. Sphere is a heavy consumer of ORDS, and they love the product. If you have an ORDS story to share email me. Let’s collab on a similar write-up.
GitHub
Apparently the oracle/docker-images/ords repo has been “dormant” for quite sometime. Well no more. We (Adrian and I) are now in full control of the ORDS content. So we are updating the Dockerfiles and README. They should be ready in a week or so (end of July 2025), we are finalizing the drafts now. And if you have an outstanding/pending issue you can expect to see some movement on your ticket.
Oracle Container Registry
We have taken your feedback and updated the README for the ORDS official container. You can see the latest here. However, we have another update planned, so if you don’t see your suggestions yet, give us another week! We are updating the README to make it more approachable for a container newbie, and we are adding in some additional, helpful comments in the compose.yaml file too!
Oracle Cloud World 2025
We are in full Cloud World mode now, till the end October. View the details and register here. Kris, Jeff, and I will be there. We’ll be presenting on several topics. But if travel isn’t in your future, never fear, we’ll have recordings of the presentations once Cloud World has wrapped up.
Official Release Notes
And finally, the official release notes can be found here.
That’s all for now, thanks for stopping by 😊.
