Sean Hull

Introduction Oracle is a complicated beast to administer; why make our lives more difficult?  A lot of people ask that question when they look at a command line interface.  My response is always the same.  If you’re trying to use the database, interfacing with it through an application, you’re an end user.  So the more […]

1. Introduction As you might imagine, migrating a database and it’s attendant applications is no small affair.  Throw into the mix a switch of database platform, and you certainly have your hands full.  In this two part article, we’ll be discussing all of the steps involved in this process, questions to ask yourself, what to […]

1. Introduction As you might imagine, migrating a database and its attendant applications is no small affair.  Throw into the mix a switch of database platform, and you certainly have your hands full.  In this two part article, we’ll be discussing all of the steps involved in this process, questions to ask yourself, what to […]

Introduction In Part I of this series we talked about some of the vulnerabilities present in the Oracle core database product.  We took the perspective of the hacker, explaining how your database can be attacked with SQL Injection, weak default passwords, brute force attacks against the login authentication process, and lastly sneaking data out the […]

Introduction Oracle is touted as being unbreakable, if talk weren’t so cheap. Well as with any computing system, there are ways to hack it, and Oracle is no exception. In this piece, we’ll talk about some of the ways that you can get at data you’re not supposed to. We’ll start by taking the perspective […]

In the last piece of our database comparison, we hit upon various areas such as triggers, views, and stored procedures. Though the feature sets certainly differ between Oracle, Postgresql, and MySQL, most of your daily needs are met in these areas. This time around, we’ll hit upon some areas where the platforms differ more significantly, […]

With the ever-burgeoning feature sets available in modern databases, it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are plenty of high-level data warehousing features in Oracle for instance that you might never need. Moreover, there may be some other features such as ACID compliant transactions that you just can’t do without. We’ll look […]

The open-source community around databases, and Oracle specifically, has literally exploded in the last couple of years. The final installment of this two -part article covers open-source administration, security, benchmarking and monitoring tools. Administration Tools JOraStat – admin – (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jorastat/) This tool is designed to help you forecast changing database needs. If you plot trends […]

As a DBA, you have lots of software, scripts, and applications, which help you with your day-to-day operations. Some you’ve written yourself, and some may be commercial solutions providing a lot of feature rich assistance to you. However, there are also times when a script or community created tool really fits the bill. Fortunately, the […]

Oracle’s Standby technology has been rebranded as DataGuard in recent versions of Oracle. Oracle has added a layer of technology automation on top of the standby technology, making automatic Standby technology seamless. But what about the folks on Standard Edition Oracle? Are they left out in the cold? Well, it turns out that it is […]

There are nearly an infinite number and combination of questions one can pose to a DBA candidate in an interview. I prefer to lean towards the conceptional, rather than the rote, as questions of this kind emphasize your foundation, and thorough understanding. Besides, I’ve never been one to remember facts and details I can lookup […]