Tip Tuesday | Connect to Public ADB Without a Wallet

When connecting to a publicly available Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) it requires a mutual transport layer (mTLS) to establish a mutual authentication between the cloud database instance and your client application, ensuring an encrypted and secure connection. This is achieved by using a shared wallet, that contains the certificate needed to establish this mutual authentication. 

If, however, your connection is private you don't need mTLS and there is no need for the wallet. Now, let's say you have an Always Free ADB instance. This is a type of instance Oracle provides, free of change for life! It does have CPU and storage limitations, but is great for experimenting, learning and sandboxing. The Always Free instance also comes with a limitation: It cannot be made private; it has to be public. 

To connect to such an instance using just TLS (i.e. no wallet), we can enable a Network Access control list, that whitelists your IP - there's even a convenient "Add my IP" button. Once the change has been activated, we can turn off the "Mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication". As long as you are still coming from the same IP you can now connect without supplying the wallet. (ADB listens on port 1521 for TLS and 1522 for mTLS).