Pete Finnigan

We have one set of Manuals for the recent training we held here in York and one from 2018. These can be bought as individual books as follows: This manual is from the York class in October 2019 and can....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 19/11/19 At 03:05 PM

There has been a few blog posts over the years discussing what is the difference between SELECT ANY DICTIONARY and the SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE. Hemant posted in 2014 about the difference between SELECT ANY DICTIONARY and SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE . This post was a....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 11/10/19 At 01:59 PM

Oracle has a lot of privileges and models; privileges can be granted to users, roles and also since 12c roles can be granted to PL/SQL code (I will not discuss this aspect here as i will bog separately about grants....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 08/10/19 At 01:43 PM

I posted yesterday a blog about an error on a sequence of ORA-01950 on tablespace USERS - ORA-01950 Error on a Sequence . This was attributed to the sequence by me because that's where the error in Oracle was pointing....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 01/10/19 At 01:12 PM

UPDATE: I have updated information for this post and rather than make this one much longer i created a new post - please see ORA-01950 Error on a Sequence - Error on Primary Key Index Wow, its been a while....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 30/09/19 At 01:42 PM

We are very excited to announce that we are currently working to have version 3.0 of PFCLScan our flagship database security scanner for the Oracle database. We will be ready for sale in September and this development is going really....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 11/07/19 At 03:33 PM

We have a toolkit called PFCLATK that is used in customer engagements to assist our customers to create comprehensive and useful audit trails for their databases. The toolkit is used in consulting engagements at the moment but will be adding....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 06/06/19 At 03:08 PM

Hackers are clever people; they must be to hack other people and take over their private data and steal identities and money. I have to draw the limit at the number of hackers who claim to be in my PC....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 19/05/19 At 10:08 PM

Our Audit Trail toolkit PFCLATK has some brief documentation on the page that's linked here but in summary it is a comprehensive toolkit that allows quick and easy deployment of an audit trail into a customers database. We are currently....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 12/03/19 At 09:20 PM

I posted last week that I will teach my two day class " How to Perform a Security Audit of an Oracle Database " with Oracle University in London on the 29th and 30th April 2019. We have now added....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 11/03/19 At 11:52 AM

The Problem: Dan asked me a question about whether the DBA can be stopped from accessing views such as V$SQL or V$SQL_BIND_CAPTURE with Database Vault because these views can be used to read data from the SGA. I have covered....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 08/03/19 At 03:41 PM

I have just agreed some training dates with Oracle University in London and I will be teaching my very popular two day class How to Perform a security audit of an Oracle database on the 29th and 30th April 2019....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 07/03/19 At 12:15 PM

I teach many training classes on Oracle security to lots of students worldwide both on-site and on-line and one area I often cover quote briefly is where can you find more information or keep up to date on Oracle security....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 23/12/18 At 05:53 PM

I got an email from someone recently who asked me about virtual patching for Oracle as they were running an out of date version of Oracle and were thinking that virtual patching maybe a good solution to make their database....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 19/12/18 At 01:32 PM

Wow!!, i just got an email from someone in Oracle to let me know that the Privilege Analysis feature of Database Vault has had its licensing changed from this week to now be free as part of an Enterprise Edition....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 20/11/18 At 10:06 PM

I started this blog post a few weeks ago and kept adding to it from time to time but I have been incredibly busy helping people secure data in their Oracle databases that it has taken a long time to....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 14/11/18 At 02:20 PM

Oracles core database audit is a useful tool to monitor activity of the core database engine or applications and detect potential abuses. It seems to be a sad fact that with a lot of companies that i visit and from....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 15/09/18 At 08:28 AM

Are you worried about the data in your databases being stolen? GDPR has just become law across the EU and the UK and affects business in other countries that process EU citizens data. Maybe you store and process credit card....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 19/07/18 At 02:04 PM

In a 12.2.0.2 database it's possible that Oracle generates 6 different password hashes for one password for one user under certain circumstances when a password is changed or created (user is created). I will layout the 6 different ones first....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 13/06/18 At 09:02 PM

I talked here a few days ago about GDPR in general and I also published my slides from my talk GDPR for the Oracle DBA . We have been helping clients secure data in their Oracle databases and training people....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 09/06/18 At 04:33 PM