Database Backups and Gasoline Leaks
How is a database backup like a portable generator with a gasoline leak? And why should you care on a beautiful sunny September morning? How does any of this relate to Business Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning and testing? Read On! Lack of Preparation Until Superstorm Sandy in 2012, we had lived in our NJ town […]
Architect Your Oracle Database for Efficient Backup and Recovery
Architecting for Backup and Recovery Efficiency with Oracle RMAN Database architecture is critical to achieving many business objectives. These include application performance, business continuity, security, and geographic distribution. This article will explore another often overlooked objective that can be influenced by the database architecture: backup optimization and recovery efficiency. Very large databases are common in today’s […]
The Cloud Does Not Exist!
“Lets Move to The Cloud!” We often hear people talk about moving their business or their data center or their software to “The Cloud“. For many, this concept seems confusing and vague. That’s because The Cloud does not exist! There is no “The Cloud”. In reality, there are many clouds. And therefore we can’t just decide to […]
Duplicating and Recovering Oracle Databases with RMAN
Oracle Recovery Manager Purpose And History Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) was developed essentially as a way to more effectively backup and recover Oracle databases, as an automation mechanism for the same, and as a way to keep track of and managing backup sets. It was introduced in version 8 of the Oracle database, so it […]
Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD) — Granting Just Enough Access
Robust Access Control At The Database Layer Many Companies struggle with the difficult problem of providing fine grained access control at the database layer to sensitive data . We will discuss Oracle’s Virtual Private Database feature which provides a robust way of handling this problem for all types of database users. Security vs Effectiveness Securing access […]
Pursuing Excellence: Golf and Software Development
How to Improve After a particularly bad round of golf recently, I was thinking about how to improve my game. I thought about how we go about making improvements in anything we do. We evaluate what we have done, and based on that evaluation, we try to make changes that we think will help us get […]
Plugging the Database Audit Trail Gap
The Importance of Database Audit Trails and Security Assessments Database audit trails are critical tools for discovery, investigation, and prosecution of cyber crimes ranging from credit card theft to malicious activity by ex-employees to corporate espionage. And database security assessments are critical tools for preventing such activity. But an audit trail or a security assessment is only as good […]
Using Oracle GoldenGate for real time data replication and integration.
Oracle GoldenGate is Oracle’s best-of-breed, strategic solution for real-time data replication and integration. It offers a rapid, robust and low-overhead approach for moving small or large volumes of transactional data between diverse operational and analytical systems—including not just various Oracle Database versions but also non-Oracle databases like SQL Server, Sybase, IBM DB2 and others. Though […]
Time to Validate Your Database Backup
Another new client, Another bad backup I originally wrote this post in July but I am updating it today because it is so important. Yesterday we did an initial Oracle Database Health Check for another new client and found yet again that their backups are useless. This time the client was taking backups regularly, but […]
Best Practices for Error Handling in Database Stored Procedures
I recently performed an assessment of a large set of Oracle stored procedures and batch scripts that a client uses as part of their build and update process. The problem was that the build process was not very stable. During each build, something would go wrong, such as a table not being created or loaded […]
