Always Free Autonomous JSON Database?

Introduction

Oracle just released the Autonomous JSON Database (AJD). This is a special version of the Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) database focussing on managing JSON documents via Simple Oracle Document Access (SODA) and SQL.

Beda Hammerschmidt shows in this blog post how you can use SQL Developer Web to execute SODA and SQL commands against this new Autonomous Database type. You can create a trial account and try this new offer for free. But what if you already have a cloud account and you don’t have free credits left? No problem, you can run it in your Always Free ATP database. Here’s how it works.

Create User

Connect as the ADMIN user and run the following commands:

CREATE USER soda IDENTIFIED BY Your_Secret_Password_42
   DEFAULT TABLESPACE data
   QUOTA UNLIMITED ON data;

GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE, SODA_APP TO soda;

BEGIN
   ORDS.ENABLE_SCHEMA(
      p_enabled              => TRUE,
      p_schema               => 'SODA',
      p_url_mapping_type     => 'BASE_PATH',
      p_url_mapping_pattern  => 'soda',
      p_auto_rest_auth       => TRUE
   );
   COMMIT;
END;
/

This will create a new user soda with all privileges to store JSON documents via SODA and to connect via SQL Developer Web.

Run SQL Developer Web

Navigate to the tools page within your Always Free ATP database and click on the “Open SQL Developer Web” button.

This will open an URL similar to

https://...adb.eu-frankfurt-1.oraclecloudapps.com/ords/admin/_sdw/?nav=worksheet .

Change the last part of the URL to /ords/soda/_sdw in the address bar of your browser und press enter.

Sign in as soda and change to the worksheet. Now you can try Beda’s examples yourself.

This is not an Always Free Autonomous JSON Database. However, you should now have everything you need to become familiar with many features of an Autonomous JSON Database. For free.