Using the Slack webhook API from PL/SQL

Slack is a web-based chat room popular with many companies. Slack also has an API that can be used to post messages to a given "channel" or chat room. The simplest API offered is the "webhook" integration, which is "a simple way to post messages from external sources into Slack. They make use of normal HTTP requests with a JSON payload that includes the message text and some options."

To create a new Slack webhook, login to Slack and go to "Apps" in the left sidebar menu. Click "Manage apps..." and click "Custom Integrations" and then "Incoming Webhooks". Click on "Add Configuration" to create a new webhook. Specify the channel the webhook will post in, and click "Add incoming webhooks integration".

 

Next, take a note of the Webhook URL:

Then go to the Alexandria PL/SQL Utility Library and install the SLACK_UTIL_PKG package in your database schema. Modify your database Network ACL settings to include "hooks.slack.com" (port 443) to allow connections to the Slack site from the database.

Then use the package like this (see also demo script):

In addition to application-specific messages you could perhaps also set up the database (via a background job) to notify you when you are about to run out of disk space, when the number of APEX page views reach a certain threshold, when a specific user logs in, and so on. Use your imagination! :-)

Oracle on Windows Azure pricing revealed

I just noticed that prices for Oracle Database running on Windows Azure have now been published.

The prices for the virtual machines with the Oracle license included run from about USD 820 per month for Oracle Standard Edition (SE) running on 2 cores, to a whopping USD 9300 per month for Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) running on 8 cores. These prices are for Oracle software only and do not include the cost of the VM, which is billed separately.

Alternatively, with "License Mobility", you obtain a license as normal from Oracle and run that software on Windows Azure by deploying a Windows Server or Linux VM and installing a copy of the licensed Oracle software. Azure is listed as an "Authorized Cloud Environment" in the Oracle Cloud Licensing Policy. As I understand it, this policy allows you to use Oracle Standard Edition One (SE1) on Azure (up to 4 cores = 1 processor license, up to 8 cores = 2 processor licenses), which would be a quite cheap entry-level option for small businesses, since you would pay once for a perpetual database license, and then just pay monthly for the Azure VM (ie just the Windows/Linux Server software, not the database).

There's also an article at ZDNet with more details.