Oracle + Open Source
two worlds inexorably colliding

If you’re interested in getting started with Oracle’s AWR facility, roughly the new statspack that’s built in, and easier to use, take a look at this new article over at Database Journal.

Intro to Oracle’s Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) 

If you’re already building LAMP applications (linux/apache/mysql/php), and you’re looking to port them to Oracle, or you’re new to this technology stack, and you want to use Oracle as your database, this article is for you.  We cover the basics of gettings started, and where to look for more information.

Intro to PHP + Oracle - Database Journal - Aug 14, 2008

In our latest database journal piece, we cover some useful Oracle-supplied pl/sql stored procedures to help you instrument and debug your code, dump metadata descriptions of your database objects (a la MySQL dump –no-rows) and much more.

Take a look at  DBA Insider - Useful PL/SQL Packages.

What is ASM, and why do we need it?  In this piece, we cover the impetus for it’s creation, and what you can do with it.  Oracle Automatic Storage Management

If you’ve ever wanted to write scripts to talk to your database, perhaps to perform a routine maintenance operation, or to build a more full-fledged application, you may have considered Perl.  It’s a flexible language, with a huge collection of prebuilt modules, and components to choose from.

In this May article over at databasejournal.com, we give you an insiders introduction to the goodness that is Perl + Oracle:  Programming, Perl + Oracle.

Oracle Indexing - What, Where, When?

This piece was published in April over at databasejournal.com.  In it we discuss some of the myriad different index types available to you in Oracle, and try to sift through to the most important ones.

In March 2008, we published this article over at Database Journal: Create a Database Manually - When & Why?

In Oracle you have the option to use the GUI database creation assistant tool, or you can script the process.  We discuss how to do this manually, when you may want to, and hopefully learn a few new things along the way.

Our two part article on migrating a MySQL database to Oracle features in Database Journal in January and February of this year.  Take a look and please post your comments!

Migrating From MySQL To Oracle - Part I

Migrating From MySQL To Oracle - Part II

The second in a series of two articles on Oracle security was features over at Database Journal back in December 2007.  Take a look at Eight Ways To Hack Oracle Part 2.

I just published the first half of a two part series over at Database Journal called Eight Ways to Hack Oracle.

The article is really an overview of vulnerabilities in the core database product, and how to protect against them.  Part one covers SQL Injection, a way of putting malformed entries into a web page in order to trick the application to run your query.  This can be very dangerous, and is a lot more common than you might think.  Next we cover default passwords, those are obvious right?  Except you’d be surprised how many there are, and how much of a pest they turn out to be.  Next we talk about brute force methods to get into the database, and how affective they are.  And lastly we speak about sneaking information out of the database, and how it can be done.

In part two of the series we cover listener vulnerabilities, privilege escalation which allows some of those underprivileged and default passworded accounts like scott/tiger to become extremely useful.  Lastly we hit on operating system and filesystem vulnerabilities, and how to protect against them.

In Part II in this series, I talk about how these three databases compare in some particularly crucial areas.

For instance how do the optimizers of these different database engines behave, and why does that matter?  What type of indexes are available, particularly with respect to typical applications.  I then move on to datatypes available and which are missing.  You’ll find some surprises here.

Lastly the holy grail of any modern relational database, I discuss transactional support. Relevant concepts include ACID compliance, read-only versus insert and update activity, and so on.

If you’re interested in how these three databases measure up in terms of feature sets, take a look at part one in a two part series I wrote over at Database Journal.

I discuss stored procedures, views, materialized views or snapshots, triggers, and security. Stored procedures and functions are supported on all three databases, as are views and triggers. Although MySQL and Postgres aren’t there in terms of default snapshot support, there are ways to get that functionality in a somewhat roundabout way.

Security is always a tricky question, as all the bugs out there aren’t always publicized. It’s sort of a cat and mouse game. All three databases support user based authentication to login to the database, and various privilege levels to control access to objects and data. Oracle also supports FGA or fine grained access control for column level control.

That said I might tend to say that open-source products in general have better security, their source being an open book and all.