James Koopmann

Much has been said about why Oracle acquired Sun, how it will be the demise of the free world and produce a one-world database monopoly. While there is probably a little truth in the statement, we should keep in mind that much of what is happening can be beneficial for the end customer. There has […]

Archive log destinations can be tricky when defining or viewing in Oracle Database. Stick to a few common rules and never get lost. Let’s begin with the basics. In the last article, I ventured down the path of a default installation to show where the destinations for archive logs where. In this article, as default […]

Ignore your archive logging function and your Oracle database will soon become crippled and unusable. Learn how to pay attention, starting with ensuring that Automatic archival is Enabled, how to switch into archive log mode if it’s not enabled and how to locate where redo logs are archived. It isn’t too much of a stretch […]

Before you start monitoring your Oracle database, make sure you understand some of the behind-the-scenes issues of using Oracle monitoring. In a not too distant land, not long ago, we DBAs leaned very heavily on a set of scripts affectionately called BSTAT & ESTAT. These two scripts, which were originally run by hand, birthed a […]

Before starting to audit your Oracle database, use some of these guidelines to help you plan your auditing initiative. Over the last two months, we’ve been taking a look at the Oracle 2-Day Security Guide. Up to this point, we’ve taken a look at the following topics:

In this article we set up and create a standard audit trail through the use of Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Up to this point, for auditing we’ve focused on setting up some defaults and in particular creating an audit trail through the use of SQL*Plus. This article, as I thought it would be a nice tie-in, […]

If you don’t know where to start when setting Oracle auditing parameters, just start with what Oracle recommends. In this article, we set the default auditing as recommended by Oracle. Most of us probably give no thought to the auditing being done within an Oracle database. If we just fly through database creation, we may […]

Database auditing is big business. Are you ready for the challenge to pass an audit? This article begins with an introduction to Oracle’s standard auditing that we can build on to answer that question. Auditing of an Oracle database has became big business. So much so, that entire companies have dedicated complete solutions to the […]

Much of the communication between client and server, in an Oracle environment, is unsecured and clear-text. With Oracle Advanced Security and Secure Sockets Layer, network traffic and communication between user and database can become more secured. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a cryptographic protocol that provides security for communication over the network by encrypting segments […]

In the last article, I quickly presented what a client-server connection was all about in regards to an Oracle database. Very simply a client is nothing more than a system or application that requires a connection to the database server to send or retrieve data. About the only requirement for an external system or application […]

Connection methods to Oracle databases have remained relatively static over the years. Unfortunately, governmental regulations and would-be attackers have not stood still. This, and subsequent articles, will begin to look at how we can help secure client connections. Before venturing down the path of “Securing Client Connections”, I thought it would be best to first […]

I don’t know how many database shops I’ve gone into that have no idea of the security breaches that occur across user granted privilege and floating unused synonyms. The Oracle 2-Day Security Guide starts out chapter 4 talking about managing user privileges. The discussion begins by telling the reader that they must control user privileges […]