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Oracle Developers profile image Anders Swanson
Anders Swanson for Oracle Developers

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Using Agent Skills to develop with Oracle AI Database

#oracle #ai #agents #software

Skills are reusable, task-specific workflows for your agents: each skill is a directory centered on a SKILL.md file, with optional scripts, references, and assets packaged together.

Skills bring context efficient capabilities to agents in a reliable, repeatable manner.

In this article, we'll look at what skills are, how to install them, and how the open source oracle-db-skills repo can help your agents do real work with Oracle AI Database. You can even easily write or extend the existing skills on your own!

  1. Install skills
  2. Using Oracle AI Database skills
  3. Have a suggestion or a new skill? Contribute it!

Install skills

First, install the skills into your agent. With Codex, you can use the skills installer. Make sure to restart Codex afterwards:

$skill-installer https://github.com/krisrice/oracle-db-skills
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With Claude Code, either clone or copy the repo into your Claude-specific skills directory:

git clone git@github.com:krisrice/oracle-db-skills.git
cp -r oracle-db-skills ~/.claude/skills/
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Using Oracle AI Database skills

Let's use our newly installed skills to create a local Oracle AI Database Free container. These containers are great for local dev, POCs, and testing.

Using Codex, we can explicitly invoke the skill using the $oracle-db-skills skill command. With Claude Code, use /oracle-db-skills to invoke the skill. Let's do so using the following prompt:

$oracle-db-skills start a new oracle ai database container for local development and give me the sqlcl connection command
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Using this prompt, Codex inspected my local environment to ensure it could pull and run the container, and then ran the following command to start an Oracle AI Database Free container:

• Ran docker run -d --name oracle-ai-free -p 1521:1521 -e ORACLE_PWD=Oracle123! -v oracle-ai-free-data:/opt/oracle/oradata
  │ container-registry.oracle.com/database/free:latest
  └ b4daa0c4f9b5966087395005ddd251e68a7cdf1cae851b006cd7800da947fd04
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After verifying the container started correctly, Codex then gave me the following SQLcl commands to connect:

• Started a new Oracle AI Database Free container from the official image as oracle-ai-free. It's healthy on localhost:1521, and the PDB
  FREEPDB1 is open read/write.

  Use SQLcl like this for normal development work:

  sql system/Oracle123!@//localhost:1521/FREEPDB1

  If you need SYSDBA, use:

  sql sys/Oracle123!@//localhost:1521/FREE as sysdba
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Both of which connect to the container started by the agent, using the skill.

Have a suggestion or a new skill? Contribute it!

The oracle-db-skills GitHub repo is open source, so if you have an idea or suggestion, go ahead and contribute it. The repo is designed to be an evolving set of curated skills, meaning developer feedback is essential.

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