Database Blog


  • Oracle Active Data Guard Replication Error with Cisco Firewall: Root Cause and Workaround

    Apr 22, 2020

    Reading Time: 2 minutes One of our customers had issues over the past several months with Oracle Active Data Guard replication to a standby server. The database on the standby server would intermittently fall out of sync with the database on the primary server, and log files were not consistently shipping to the standby server.

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  • Test Your Disaster Recovery Strategies before Disaster Strikes

    Mar 20, 2020

    Reading Time: 2 minutes As the old saying goes, “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” and testing your disaster recovery data is essential to keeping you and your data safe!

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  • It’s in the Database

    Mar 3, 2020

    Reading Time: < 1 minute Managed Health Systems of Indiana patient health information, July-September, 2019; Microsoft customer service and support records, January 22, 2020; Wyze email addresses, December 30, 2019; Georgia Tech student data, March 2019. What do all of these breaches have in common? The data that was stolen was inside a database. Yet when most companies think about data security, they still focus on securing the network, and spend very little time and energy making sure the databases—where…..

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  • Communication Breakdown: Avoiding Conflict with Your Customers

    Dec 4, 2019

    Reading Time: 5 minutes This post describes two kinds of situations where conflict is likely to occur if we don’t handle things well, along with some thoughts about how to avoid conflict in these and other instances.

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  • Oracle Data Encryption Options

    Nov 21, 2019

    Reading Time: 2 minutes Oracle offers various authentication and audit features to protect data from unauthorized access. But what about data at rest in operating system files, backups or other storage media?

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  • GDPR Right to Be Forgotten and Other Access Rights

    Oct 31, 2019

    Reading Time: 7 minutes To ease compliance with Article 15, 16, and 17 of GDPR, and to support compliance with other GDPR Articles, we recommend the following steps with regard to handling of personal data.

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

    Sep 30, 2019

    Reading Time: 3 minutes 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 even when you think your process is working. Recently we had a client that was looking to reduce storage costs…..

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  • Ever Dropped an Oracle Table and Wish You Hadn’t?

    Jun 1, 2016

    Reading Time: 2 minutes If you’ve ever dreamed of going to a recycle bin like you can on Windows, and “undropping” an Oracle database table… Oracle has made your dream come true! Introduced with Oracle 10g, Oracle’s recycle bin works a lot like what you’re used to in Windows. When this feature is enabled (the default setting), dropped tables don’t actually get deleted. Instead, they “land” in the recycle bin and can be restored. The recycle bin is actually…..

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  • Architecting to Maximize Recovery Options in Oracle

    Apr 21, 2016

    Reading Time: 2 minutes I recently received a frantic call from a client that believed they have been hacked and had to quickly recover data. They said that data belonging to two or more of their customers had been lost. Our customer functions essentially as an application service provider (ASP). Their customers’ data is in an Oracle database that our client manages. Our client organizes this database such that each of its customers’ applications is served by a separate…..

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  • Do You Know If Your Data Backup and Recovery Strategy Is Working… Or Not?

    Feb 1, 2016

    Reading Time: 2 minutes To mitigate the business impacts of downtime and data loss, every Oracle database must be recoverable. This means every Oracle shop needs a strong backup and recovery strategy—one that takes into account the probabilities of hardware, software, network or procedural failure(s) in your current environment.

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