This is part 4 of a 3 part series. Heh I guess this qualifies as a little lagniappe on security and audit. I could have called this Oracle Audit but I already spoke about audit in Part 3. I just decided to continue on in the series.

This is a brief, technical discussion about the implementation of audit in Oracle 10g. I’ll quickly show how to turn on standard audit and how to see some of the audit taking place. I’ll follow that with an implementation of FGA and finally a trigger based audit.

One aspect of auditing is to audit your administrators.

Regardless of any regulations you are required to meet you can implement a security and audit scheme that will cover you for most, if not all, eventualities. Having good security and auditability should be desirable regardless of regulations. It protects your business.

In parts 1 and 2, I covered the security side of it. So what do I mean by Audit? Well, auditing is knowing what’s going on in your environment. Future research requirements, accountability, error correction, etc are all covered by audit.

So how does Oracle implement audit? There are several ways you can do it: Standard Audit, Fine Grained Audit and Trigger Based Audit.

Warning: Personal Soapbox Approaching.

I was reading a newsgroup discussion and the topic of DBAs and their usefulness/trivialization came up (yet again). This topic seems to show up at one time or another on every Oracle discussion board.

Whether I agree or not with any of the things said in the discussion doesn’t really matter. It got me thinking about the topic and I have a different perspective to the question. My personal soapbox on this issue is the definition of DBA. Are DBAs being trivialized in the enterprise?

This is the second entry of a three part series. In part one of this series, I defined what security is and what the different aspects of security in Oracle entailed. In this entry, I am going to show the technical details of implementing security in Oracle. I will create a user, give that user access and then give an example implementation of row and column level security. In part three, I will add auditing to this mix and describe some security best practices, both to protect your data and to meet regulatory requirements.

I’m going into this level of detail because I think some people are not familiar with it and it seems mysterious.

This is a three-part definition of Oracle Security (specifically in 10g but applies to later versions also). Part 1 covers the various types of security Oracle provides. Part 2 deals with Users/Schemas, Roles, Permissions and Data Access. Part 2 will be a more technical discussion than parts 1 or 3. In part 3, I will discuss implementing an Oracle auditing scheme and how to ensure you comply with security and audit regulations.

What exactly do I mean by security? There are several aspects of security in an enterprise work place: locked doors, guards, cameras, etc. There are just as many aspects when protecting enterprise data.

Here is an entry from a Project Manager blog called: Eight Steps on the Collaborative Way. I found it to be a very interesting article and very true. I haven’t seen this list before but it’s contain items that I try to include in my development projects, whether I’m working in a project manager role or not. Definately worth a read.

Lewis

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I ran across this link while looking for something else. This is a discussion about Oracle PowerBrowser. Talk about a ride in the way back machine!

Lewis

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I’m going to start a new daily entry in addition to my other entries. I’ll call it the Thought of the Day. It will be an interesting link or thought or joke or just something I read somewhere. It will usually pertain, somehow, to Oracle but like today it might not.

Today’s thought is a link to the best Bash Shell Script guide I’ve ever seen. It’s a reference and a tutorial. I’m no Linux guru and certainly no scritping guru but I really like this guide.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

Thanks,

Lewis