Ever Dropped an Oracle Table and Wish You Hadn’t?

If you’ve ever dreamed of going to a recycle bin like you can on Windows, and “undropping” an Oracle database table… Oracle has made your dream come true! Introduced with Oracle 10g, Oracle’s recycle bin works a lot like what you’re used to in Windows. When this feature is enabled (the default setting), dropped tables […]

Architecting to Maximize Recovery Options in Oracle

I recently received a frantic call from a client that believed they have been hacked and had to quickly recover data. They said that data belonging to two or more of their customers had been lost. Our customer functions essentially as an application service provider (ASP). Their customers’ data is in an Oracle database that […]

Do You Know If Your Data Backup and Recovery Strategy Is Working… Or Not?

To mitigate the business impacts of downtime and data loss, every Oracle database must be recoverable. This means every Oracle shop needs a strong backup and recovery strategy—one that takes into account the probabilities of hardware, software, network or procedural failure(s) in your current environment.

Tracking Oracle Database Access for Regulatory Compliance

Data stored in corporate databases is subject to increasing regulatory scrutiny. To ensure compliance with security guidelines in major regulations like SOX, PCI, HIPAA and FISMA, you need to implement controls not only to protect data from unauthorized access, but also to monitor and report on access when it occurs. This capability, usually referred to […]

7 New Offerings: Oracle Steps Up Its Big Data Game

For any big data effort to succeed, an organization needs to figure out how to combine the right data from the right sources to generate the right insights to achieve its goals. Transactional applications might hold data on customer purchases, for instance. But their browsing patterns, loyalty interactions and responses to tweeted offers are probably […]

Still Think Your Business is Too Small for Big Data?

Just because your business isn’t that big doesn’t mean you don’t have “big data” issues or a need for big data-style analytics to remain competitive. “Big data” is a relative term—relative to needs and capabilities for making business decisions, that is. Nearly every organization, whatever its size, will sooner or later reach the point where […]

4 Key Use Cases for Oracle’s Multitenant Architecture

If you’re thinking of moving to Oracle Database 12c, “the first database designed for the cloud,” one of the most compelling reasons could be the Oracle Multitenant Architecture option. In this revolutionary new architecture, you can “plug” many Oracle databases into a single container database—no application changes required. Let’s quickly head off any potential confusion […]

Get Your Oracle Databases Ready to Go Mobile

One of the big questions on the minds of more and more Oracle database users is “How do we leverage our Oracle investment to enable mobile applications?” Mobility isn’t just about using a tablet or mobile phone. It’s about providing secure, reliable and fast access to backend data and processes (like CRM and ERP)—on-demand. That […]

You Need More than a Firewall to Protect Your Oracle Databases

Unless you’ve been in suspended animation for the past few years, you know that major government agencies and global enterprises are hacked with numbing regularity despite their best efforts to defend themselves. Whether from nation states, cybercriminals or disgruntled staff, your Oracle databases are vulnerable to similar attack. In most organizations, two-thirds of sensitive and […]

5 Reasons Not to Put Your Oracle Databases in the Cloud

As I blogged about recently, Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important option for many Oracle database customers. But “data in the cloud” is not right for every business, and there are important issues to be aware of as you consider how or if to leverage DBaaS. Following are five concerns that might limit your use of […]