Accessing NTFS partition from Linux

Linux does not offer the default support for NTFS partitions. Although you can natively access them but you can't actually use them especially in read/write mode. I required this because my VMs were originally created in Windows and I can't create FAT partitions for them because it has limitation on size of file.

No brainer. I just googled for sometime and found a solution which did not worked in its entirity but with some tweaking I made it to work. You can find the original article here. But here is what worked for me.

You need ntfs-3g drivers to access and modify data on NTFS partitions. To install this driver you first have to create a yum repository for this. The repository is as expected located under fedora project.

Log in using root and execute the following commands to create repository.

$ su
password:
# cd /etc/init.d/yum.repos.d
# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

The above command will download the rpm file which you will install to create repository.

# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Once the repository has been setup, you can now use yum to install the actual driver.

# yum install ntfs-3g

The driver is now installed and you are ready to mount your NTFS partition. Use the following to locate the ntfs partition.

# fdisk -l

In my case I wanted to mount parition located at /dev/sda3. Create a folder to serve as mount point.

# mkdir -p /home/oracle/ntfs

Use the following to mount the drive.

# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda3 /home/oracle/ntfs

Identity columns to debut in 12C

Identity columns are set to debut in the upcoming new version of oracle database. You no longer had to create sequence and write before insert triggers to auto update primary key columns. The following syntax is set to work in 12c and will do everything for you.

SQL> CREATE TABLE TEST (
ID GENERATE AS IDENTITY COLUMN,
.
.
.
);

Behind the scenes oracle will create the sequence and will update the column when new records are entered.

This is not something new or out of the box as other databases like SQL SERVER and MySQL have this feature for quite sometime. Oracle however relied on the hard programmatic way until now. 12c is set to change that.