Patches

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How do I know when to patch or to leave well enough alone?

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Every business wants the same thing: a database that services clients with the utmost performance and is always available. In the war against downtime, patches can be a rogue force. When something goes wrong, patches may let instability—the enemy—in through the front door. Patches always promise to fix a problem. If not for that promise, […]

Only 10% of Oracle Databases are Secure!

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

A recent article in eWEEK revealed alarming statistics surrounding patch and CPU application. The survey was conducted by a company that appears to benefit from the patch application process being as painful as possible (they sell a solution that attempts to mitigate security risks surrounding non-patched databases). Back to the survey, here are a few […]

Issue Installing the Oracle July 2008 CPU

Friday, February 29th, 2008

The threats mitigated by installing the quarterly security patches are numerous. There are also risks involved, in this case specifically the risk that the database will be unavailable after the patch installation until invalidated objects are recompiled.
Here is a snippet from the readme:

Run the view recompilation script. Note that this script is run with […]

Please Insert One More Bit

Monday, November 19th, 2007

I just ran into an error while installing the new CPU for October 2007 (Patch #6394981) on RHEL 4 x86_64 so I figured I would share this error to save you the time of figuring out what the problem is. See the full log here.
The errors started after 5-10 minutes of processing and looked […]

Securing Your Databases

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

Is it any wonder that database security is practically last on the “To Do” list of DBAs? Their chaotic day is filled with “installing, upgrading, capacity planning, tuning, fixing application performances, and recovering documents” as well as “firefighting their way through their day-to-day activities.”
Free time? What’s that?
In a recent article in eWEEK entitled, “The Job […]

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