Oracle Senior Vice President of Database Development Kris Rice published the Skills block for Oracle AI Database earlier this week. In just a few days, there were quite a lot of fans!
If you’re new to Skills in general, I’ve published two posts on the subject, with examples of how to leverage them with our MCP Server.
- Created a Skill to Load CSV into Oracle via SQLcl
- Introducing Kris’ skills with 2 examples – found the worst SQL in my db for the last few days, and helped me find a security issue in my database
But that’s just the surface.
“Just skimming the surface”
I think this illustrates where we are in the AI journey. You’re sitting somewhere, and you ask a question. And after some back and forth, you get the answer. In fact, quite a good answer!
But.
Do you think strategically? Let’s look at one of the exercises I went through yesterday, looking at possible security vulnerabilities in my database.
This is actually a very bad situation. And I know, because I asked. But, if I want to know tomorrow, and the day after that, I have to ask again.
Use the Agent as it is intended to be used
Let’s get out of ‘Ask’ mode, and get our money’s worth from our AI ‘friends’. To start, I asked what were some good tasks I could tackle now, as a DevOps Engineer or DBA, that would really take advantage of these newly imported Oracle skills.
Because let’s be honest, even though I’ve been doing this for decades, sometimes I just can’t get out of my own way, my own biases, and my own habits. LLMs are less burdened by this. I mean, it could be, our instructions will influence it, but let’s assume you’re asking a straightforward question.
now we have new skills for oracle and we have mcp server for oracle available to us…
What are the top 10 to 15 types of tasks that an oracle database administrator or devops engineer can complete with their Agent (like Claude!), faster, more efficiently, and easier?
This is what emerged –
And I immediately focused on this part –
Now the real work begins
great, now take 1 of them, and turn it into a new task where the dba can automate the process, for example
create simple web applications.
the data will be fetched by a set of ORDS REST APIs, and the dba will run a simple web application locally on their machine
Let’s create a bit database, ords rest apis, and a web app ‘localhost’ that the dba can open to get a list of available reports and their details
This is what I saw this morning, after letting it run.
Now I can browse the latest findings, on demand. My agent created for me:
- a set of tables to store our data
- pl/sql api to perform collection and analysis
- scheduler jobs to collect information from the Audit trail database
- a set of ORDS REST APIs to convey this information to our web application
- the actual web application I can start with one command
And here’s what I need to do to make it work:
- install those skills for my agents – more on that in 2 seconds!
- has an MCP Server (SQLcl) so it can access the database and install these objects
- did about 5 minutes of back and forth to help him fix the PL/SQL package
- provides access to the dictionary views necessary to obtain this information for application schema users
- that’s it, that’s it – I probably spent 20 minutes on this task
As a test, I created a ‘bad user’ with a really, really bad password, and guessed my way into the database. This is immediately visible in the report.
Getting started is very easy: Install the skill
A really cool resource is skills.sh
Assuming you have node.JS on your machine, you can simply run this package manager command to get started –
npx skills add krisrice/oracle-db-skillsMeanwhile, back here on earth
Yes, I live in the real world, and I know that AI is not a Silver Bullet. But he is an extraordinary helper, one could even say a ‘doer’. However, a few words of warning to accompany my very encouraging post:
- we cannot trust these agentsI did have to step in several times to provide guidance/correction
- A.I Skills will reduce how often you need to do this, but it will not eliminate your personal responsibility – You still have to be an active participant
- security when allowing your Agent to interact with your database through your MCP Server remains the most important
- ‘Jeff, your magic AI is just running a script. I’ve had this script for 15 years, it’s not giving me anything.’ Therefore. I think that’s it Agents can run your scripts faster, and ALSO analyze the resultsand action responses to these findings. Your scripts are AWESOME, so level up and import them as Skills so your Agents can use your scripts too.
- For the former point, check out our short read from Miguel Sánchez Villafán, “AI skills vs. scripts: when to use each”
Behind the scene
Note the point of this post, I’m not here to show or share code vs inspire you to do more, I realize you might be curious. Here’s a look at what my Agents collect, through our MCP Skills and Servers.
Not shown, the DBMS_SCHEDULER job, which runs daily every morning at 7am, and calls the PL/SQL api to get the latest findings.
The post Where is Your Agency? People Aren’t Using AI—But We (Oracle) Just Delivered 100+ New Skills That Are Impossible to Ignore first appeared on ThatJeffSmith.
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