It’s the 4th and final day from the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld. Despite being the final day and noticeably fewer people than previous days a packed schedule awaited with a further 6 sessions primarily covering information security utilising Oracle products.
When we talk about information security we categorise this into 3 areas which are availability, integrity and confidentiality so we’re looking at the protection of the data, the accuracy and consistency of the data, and last but not least the ability to access that data. This means that we’re covering sessions on high availability and disaster recovery in addition to data protection in today’s run-down of events.
The first session of the day kicked off with new features of enterprise manager to capture important events and notifications from Oracle Database systems. Enterprise manager acts as a single pane of glass for viewing multiple database environments whether they are on-premises, in another cloud, or in Oracle cloud.
Enterprise manager comes with some default monitoring templates but custom templates can also be created and pushed out to all of the monitored hosts to make deployment and management simple and easy to change.
New in enterprise manager is the ability to group events into a single notification rather than receiving an alert for each. This is particularly useful during maintenance windows such as when a node is taken offline and it is expected that several the related monitors are going to trigger. Another new feature is the detection of runaway SQL queries with the ability to automatically kill the runaway SQL. This feature will work looking for hung processes as well as SQL queries consuming more resources than defined and will take corrective actions to rectify them. This is something that we monitor separately ourselves but it will be a great addition to enterprise manager as well.
Next up for the day was covering the most important security features of Oracle database and how to keep data secure. This session primarily covered features that have been around for a while but either not configured to their full use or that are little known so people are just not using them. Oracle talk about 3 fundamental steps in security of the database which is to assess your current state, detect improper access to data and to prevent improper access to data.
The main features to take away from this session that we will be working to roll-out to our Oracle databases is the enabling of unified audit which combines all of the current 7 audit locations into a single audit trail. The other feature is network encryption which allows for client connections to be encrypted and data protected better whilst in transit. There were also a number of other tuning steps taken from this session and we will be working to roll out the applicable features to customers in the coming weeks.
The final session for the day and to mention is the number of tools that Oracle are making available to assess the database security and availability options. One of the key tools talked about was the database security assessment tool which assesses the configuration, identified risky users, discovers sensitive data and provides assessment reports which can be used to tune the system. We will be running this on all of our environments and making recommendations based on the reports for increasing both data security and availability.
That’s it for Oracle OpenWorld 2019 and my time reporting on the information available from the event. It’s been a fantastic conference and a lot learnt which we are looking forward to bringing to you in the coming weeks. There is also a lot of information that hasn’t been mentioned to avoid too much to read however if you would like to know more about the event and additional information please contact us using the contact page or phone number and we will be happy to discuss things relative to your environment.
By Matt Parkinson on September 20th, 2019
