Blog | BA Soapbox

Building an AI Financial Analyst with Oracle Select AI Agent — Part 3

Custom Tools, and Getting the Password Out of the Code

August 9, 2026, 9:00 am ADW Select AI OCI PL/SQL Machine Learning Python OML4Py

Registering your own PL/SQL functions as agent tools, and running pandas and numpy inside the database through OML4Py. Plus the authentication problem: a stored credential cannot be read back, but the OCI Vault can be — which removes the hardcoded password entirely.

Building an AI Financial Analyst with Oracle Select AI Agent — Part 2

The Foundation: NL2SQL and RAG

July 29, 2026, 9:00 am ADW Data Analytics Select AI OCI PL/SQL Data Warehouse

Building the foundation: table comments that make natural-language SQL work, the profiles, and the vector index. Includes the IAM policy that catches everyone — the database needs its own, and being a tenancy admin does not cover it — and the grant problem that everyone blames on roles when the real culprit is something else.

Building an AI Financial Analyst with Oracle Select AI Agent — Part 1

What It Is, Why I Went This Route, and How the Pieces Fit

July 18, 2026, 9:00 am ADW Data Analytics Select AI OCI APEX Machine Learning Data Warehouse Musing

Part 1 of a five-part series on building an AI financial analyst inside Oracle Autonomous Database. What Select AI Agent is, why an in-database agent beat the managed service for this use case, and how the four core objects — tool, task, agent, team — stack together.

From Wix to Self-Hosting my Blog

Moving BA Soapbox to Grav on Oracle Cloud

July 11, 2026, 9:33 pm OCI Terraform Grav Docker DevOps Misc Musing

How and why BA Soapbox moved off Wix to a self-hosted Grav instance on Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier, provisioned with Terraform — the stack, the manual steps Terraform did not cover, and the networking, storage and billing surprises underneath it that ate a weekend.

Its Been a While

July 6, 2026, 12:00 pm

After a three-year hiatus spent relocating back to New York and shifting into a Data Engineer role focused on AI/ML delivery on Oracle Cloud, the blog is back — with a Select AI Agent series already in the works.

Analytics and Lakehouse Integration Options for Oracle Applications

March 10, 2023, 12:00 am OCI Data Analytics OAC ADW Oracle Lakehouse

A Red Hot session on integration options between Oracle Cloud applications (Fusion, EPM) and the modern data platform on OCI, covering the Lakehouse architecture, extraction methods, and recommended patterns.

Vacation Analysis

February 17, 2023, 12:00 am Analytics

A quick survey invite: help build a data set on how people vacation by answering four short questions. Results will be shared once the analysis is complete.

Could Augmented Analytics be the Solution to the Recognition Lag?

April 4, 2022, 12:00 am Data Analytics OAC Musing

A pandemic-inspired thought piece on why the gap between an event and a company's response — the “recognition lag” — has historically been the biggest bottleneck, and how Augmented Analytics tools like Oracle Analytics Cloud help close it with AI-driven data enrichment, automated narratives, and embedded machine learning.

UKOUG Scotland 2018 – Targeted Marketing: How Marketing Companies can use Big Data to Target Customers

June 21, 2018, 12:00 am Big Data Apache Hive ODI Oracle Big Data

How an outdoor advertising company used Oracle's Big Data platform — Hive, Impala, and OAC — to turn billboard viewership data into real-time demographic insights for targeted marketing.

Getting Started with Big Data Technologies Using an Oracle VM

June 3, 2018, 12:00 am Big Data ODI12c Oracle Big Data Oracle GoldenGate

A beginner's guide to Oracle's Big Data Lite VM — what's bundled in the pre-configured image (Hadoop, ODI, GoldenGate, and more) and how to get up and running with the included hands-on labs.

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