Fix for Oracle VBCS "Error 404--Not Found"

We are using Pay As You Go Oracle VBCS instance and had an issue with accessing VBCS home page after starting the service. The service was started successfully, without errors. But when accessing VBCS home page URL - "Error 404--Not Found" was returned.

I raised a support ticket and must say - received the response and help promptly. If you would encounter similar issue yourself, hopefully, this post will share some light.

Apparently "Error 404--Not Found" was returned, because VBCS instance wasn't initialized during instance start. It wasn't initialized, because of expired password for VBCS DB schemas. Yes, you read it right - internal system passwords expire in Cloud too.

Based on the instructions given by Oracle Support, I was able to extract logs from VBCS WebLogic instance (by connecting through SSH to VBCS cloud machine) and provide it to support team (yes, VBCS runs on WebLogic). They found password expire errors in the log, similar to this:

weblogic.application.ModuleException: java.sql.SQLException: ORA-28001: the password has expired

Based on provided instructions, I extracted VBCS DB schema name and connected through SQL developer. Then I executed SQL statement given by support team to reset all VBCS DB passwords in bulk. Next password expiry is set for 2019/January. Should it expire at all?

Summary: If you would encounter "Error 404--Not Found" after starting VBCS instance and trying to access VBCS home page, then most likely (but not always) it will be related to VBCS DB schema password expiry issue.

Forecast Model Tuning with Additional Regressors in Prophet

I’m going to share my experiment results with Prophet additional regressors. My goal was to check how extra regressor would weight on forecast calculated by Prophet.

Using dataset from Kaggle — Bike Sharing in Washington D.C. Dataset. Data comes with a number for bike rentals per day and weather conditions. I have created and compared three models:

1. Time series Prophet model with date and number of bike rentals
2. A model with additional regressor —weather temperature
3. A model with additional regressor s— weather temperature and state (raining, sunny, etc.)

We should see the effect of regressor and compare these three models.

Read more in my Towards Data Science post.

Oracle ADF A Status Update

Oracle posted information update for Oracle ADF - "With the continuous investment and usage of Oracle ADF inside Oracle we expect external customers will also continue to enjoy the benefits of Oracle ADF for many more years."

Read the complete post here: https://blogs.oracle.com/jdeveloperpm/oracle-adf-a-status-update

Happy to read the update, sounds positive. Thanks to Oracle for taking time and publishing this information. #adf #middleware #javascript #oracle #cloud #oraclefusion

Serving Prophet Model with Flask — Predicting Future

The solution to demonstrate how to serve Prophet model API on the Web with Flask. Prophet — Open-Source Python library developed by Facebook to predict time series data.

An accurate forecast and future prediction are crucial almost for any business. This is an obvious thing and it doesn’t need explanation. There is a concept of time series data, this data is ordered by date and typically each date is assigned with one or more values specific to that date. Machine Learning powered models could generate forecasts based on time series data. Such forecasts could be an important source of information for business decisions.

Read more in my Towards Data Science post.