Database Blog

• Donuts and Data Backups

  Oct 3, 2019 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  This is the story of a data loss event that changed my young life and put my feet on the path of becoming a DBA.

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• Why Your Database Management Team Should Regularly Double-Check Your Backups

  Sep 30, 2019 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  I’ve blogged before about the importance of checking database backups. Over 90% of new clients that we assess have backups that are either incomplete or totally unusable (true statistic!). The following story of a backup failure that happened recently—and the successful double-check by our DBA Scott)—provides a noteworthy example of how bad backups can happen … Continue reading Why Your Database Management Team Should Regularly Double-Check Your Backups

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• An Overlooked Oracle Management Task—Support Identifier Management

  Jul 19, 2019 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  An often overlooked task that can cause problems outside of your RDBMS environment is managing your Oracle customer support identifiers (CSIs). This post offers best practices to prevent CSI-related issues.

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• Does Data Governance Make You Shudder?

  Jun 24, 2019 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  At a recent vendor conference, I found myself talking with a varied group of technology professionals. Two were technology generalists, one was a data engineer, one was responsible for transportation technology at a major university (think autonomous vehicles, traffic sensors, etc.), another was responsible for university student and teacher data (lesson plans, research findings, etc.), … Continue reading Does Data Governance Make You Shudder?

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• SQL Server Contained Databases and Oracle Multitenant: Advantages Compared

  Apr 18, 2019 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  In short, the main goal of multitenancy is to facilitate database consolidation, while the main purpose of contained databases is to enable isolation and thus portability. Yet each approach addresses both these concerns.

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• How to Resolve Oracle Database Licensing Issues with Processor Cores in Virtualized Environments

  Mar 20, 2019 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  This post focuses on Oracle database licensing by processor core, and explains a common mistakes administrators make when setting up a virtualized Oracle environment.

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• Why You Should Not Thin Provision Your Production Storage

  Feb 26, 2019 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  Thin provisioning is a good option when used in a development environment or other scenario where only test data would reside on the virtual server. But it may not be not a good choice for production environments because of the high potential for downtime and data loss.

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• How Valuable is Your Data to Your Business?

  Mar 30, 2018 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  How well do you protect your database?   You may think you are protecting it pretty well, but lets challenge that. Lets apply the same thinking to the database as you would to something more tangible. Precious Personal Possessions Imagine that you live in a gated community. Nobody can get in without passing the guard booth and giving … Continue reading How Valuable is Your Data to Your Business?

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• A Simple Way to Improve Data Security

  Mar 16, 2018 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  Shrink Your Sensitive Data Footprint Protecting data is hard. Knowing for sure that you have identified and mitigated every vulnerability takes a lot of work and constant vigilance.  The more servers you have to harden, the more databases you have to protect, the more work it is, and the more likely you will leave a hole … Continue reading A Simple Way to Improve Data Security

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• Is the Sensitive Data in your Oracle database really safe?

  Mar 13, 2018 / Posted By:Robert Buda

  Discovering Sensitive Data Oracle has long had strong database encryption functionality and it keeps getting better. But they have been lacking a simple way to identify sensitive data in the database so you know what to encrypt, audit or protect via policies.  I thought that might have improved recently with the release of a new database … Continue reading Is the Sensitive Data in your Oracle database really safe?

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