Looking For Oracle News?

If you’re in the DBA game, you HAVE to pay attention to the Oracle world. I think it’s irresponsible for people to be in a field and not pay attention to what’s going on in the world pertaining to that field. Remember, Oracle is your job, and therefore your future. Keep up to date with it! This doesn’t mean you have to know when Larry’s going to buy his next yacht, but you should know what kind of products are coming out.

However, it can be tough finding everything going on in the Oracle world. As I’m typing this, there’s probably a dozen DBAs writing articles on new methods of doing some process, hundreds of DBAs worldwide are probably performing RMAN recoveries using an article they read somewhere, and Don Burleson is probably putting the finishing touches on his next best seller.

Anyways, a news aggregator always helps. I’d recommend Breaking Oracle News on DBA-Oracle.com. You will find frequent updates with news not only about the Oracle business, but also to recent whitepapers, tips, and many other interesting topics. The chief reporters there, Don Burleson, Harry Conway, and Linda Webb search the web far and wide for choice topics that will be of interest to DBA types.

You can use an RSS Aggregator to subscribe to the feed. There are also easy instructions to add it to not only your RSS reader, but also to your website.

Enjoy!

This is a pretty neat Java based tool.  NameVoyager by iVillage allows you to see name rankings based on year and names per million babies and has a type-ahead tool that lets you type letters in to narrow down results.  Looks like Steve is losing popularity but did very well from the 40s to the 70s.  I guess that only makes sense, since I was named after a singer from the 60s/70s born in ‘45.

I absolutely love AJAX. In fact, I’m going to be speaking at Oracle OpenWorld, a presentation entitled “Putting the Express back into Oracle Application Express with AJAX.”

I also like free. This article caught my eye today, as it’s talking about several free online courses over the period of three months taught by Sang Shin, Technology Architect for Sun Microsystems, that will provide some major lessons in how AJAX works with various technologies. You can view the syllabus here.

Don’t miss it!

Have you been trying to convince friends, family, co-workers, and asylum caretakers that you’re psychic with no luck? Maybe this is the program for you! According to an article on Silicon.com, new studies are using three dimensional virtual worlds to gauge telepathic ability in humans by playing virtual ‘guessing games.’

Personally, I’m hoping one of two things will come out of the studies…1) They find that humans have extremely high telepathic abilities and begin research to discover how to harness it, or 2) They use these studies to create incredibly realistic and all encompassing video games. World of Warcraft II anyone?

According to a ComputerWorld article, Oracle has outlined it’s five growth plans as:

1. Security
2. Content Management
3. Business Intelligence
4. Grid Computing
5. Enterprise Search

These are some great areas for Oracle to grow into, honestly. Now, you may think from my last article that security would be one Oracle would have some problems with, due to the whole four month wait for a patch to fix a critical security flaw. However, this is not exactly the sort of security Oracle is hoping to grow their business with.

Database Vault (which has already been released) and Audit Vault are some awesome products, and are especially important if you’re susceptible to SOX or HIPAA audits. Though Oracle already employs grants, roles, Virtual Private Database (VPD), Label Security, enterprise users and roles, and much more, there has always been one big problem: DBAs are just too powerful. Yes, you must empower a user to do his or her job, but there are some companies that must remain very tight on their security. Database Vault helps remedy this by keeping DBAs and other privileged users from specific data.

Audit Vault is also pretty cool (or will be, when it comes out). It actually takes all the audit data in your databases and consolidates it, making it easier for security administrators to keep an eye on their systems. It also makes it very easy to create a presentation to auditors of how safe you’re keeping your data.

I don’t know too much about their content management plans, but I do know that anything can be better than a bunch of CLOBs and BLOBs indexed by interMedia!

Business Intelligence appears to be very promising. I’ve always been impressed with Oracle’s warehouse and BI tools, and their new acquisitions should bring some great new insight.

Grid Computing? Let’s see how that goes. I’ve been noticing more and more companies abandoning the grid and going back to the mainframe. With multi-core servers becoming cheaper every day, it’s hard not to go with a single machine to house many instances. Grid Computing, while very interesting and logical for some institutions, just doesn’t make sense for many companies. While Oracle is correct that Grid Computing saves money on servers, it definitely increases the cost of your Oracle licensing. At this point, however, multi-core servers are coming much cheaper and allow much better savings as less licenses are necessary.

Lastly, the Secure Enterprise Search. I wrote an article on this when it was released. It looks very promising from several points of view. First of all, I don’t doubt that Oracle will be able to pull it off logistics-wise. While Oracle’s searches have never been as fast as Google’s, their interMedia product is very good at indexing many types of data. Oracle also has made great strides bringing many business functions together, so well in fact that it’s only a logical next step to make a way to search it all. Not only that, but private data is a nearly untapped market. Google has its Google Appliance, but it hasn’t caught on as much as they had hoped and is made more for company intranets than a true corporate data consolidation and searching solution. If Oracle can make some high performance company-wide searches possible, this is an area they could truly shine in.

According to a report by C|NET, that latest Oracle patch released today fixed 65 bugs, 27 of which could be exploited remotely by anonymous attackers.

BE SURE TO APPLY THIS PATCH.

Let me give you DBAs a tip: patch your databases the moment Oracle releases a security patchset. Remember that your database is your career. When the words “database” and “problem” are mentioned in the same sentence…hell, the same DAY, all heads will swivel your way. Make sure that no matter what, you keep up to date.

If that little rant doesn’t do it for you, maybe this will. The patch that was just released includes a fix for a bug that Oracle noted on April 6th. When I say noted, what I mean is that they actually made a Metalink page that details how to do the exploit and hack most 9i and 10g installations of Oracle. The exploit allows you to insert, update, and delete information from base tables; meaning you can do something as simple as changing the SYS password, or something as devious as destroying the data dictionary. Did I also mention there’s no workaround for this?

Of course, they removed the Metalink article. But that didn’t stop Red Database Security from publishing an article detailing exactly how to do the hack. And just as a note, I don’t blame Mr. Kornbrust (the owner of Red Database Security) in the slightest for telling the world how to perform the hack. 1) A hack such as this should be fixed by Oracle IMMEDIATELY, and 2) If you let dangerous people get to a point where they could use this hack (a SQL prompt with a logged-in database user), you could clearly use a security audit.

Get those patches rolling!

Today, I received and plugged in the best office warfare tool imaginable. Yes, my friends, it is the USB Missile Launcher.

This little gizmo is insanely fun to play with. It is a small plastic missile launcher, about a half foot tall with three “turrets” that hold white foam darts. A USB cable plugs it into your computer, where you can use included software to move the turrets up, down, left, and right and fire the missiles. The launcher ships with a Windows program to manage it, but thankfully there’s a Mac port of the driver and software.

Does your manager like to come to your desk and ask you annoying questions about your database? “Why is it so sloooow?” “What do you MEAN we need more hardware?” This little baby will solve all your problems. One glimpse at the launcher homing in, the mechanical hum of hobby engines locking it on target, will send your manager scurrying for cover.

All this for about $30!

Now that I’ve started my blog, I wanted to get going with a fresh custom look. Now I truly feel like an Oracle Alchemist!

Hey, maybe one of these days I’ll get around to actually putting some Oracle tips on here. What a novel idea…

Many thanks to Kat of VexDigital.com for her amazing talent!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not new to the “blog world”…I’ve just never made one. However, after last week when I found out I had been accepted to speak at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, I thought to myself, “You’ve accomplished a lot…but you don’t even have a blog? What kind of internet nerd are you?”

So here it is. I’m a Leo, so my blog is bound to be loaded (and already is) with blatant narcissism, but will also have some fun stuff, news about me, and Oracle tips.

Enjoy!