Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs Book Review

Security, Scheduling, Performance and more

O’Reilly have now released Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs which focuses on what DBAs need to know when it comes to understanding and using PL/SQL in order to complete the day to day running of their Oracle databases.

Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs covers up to Oracle Database 10g Release 2. This includes such new features as Encryption (both traditional methods and the new Transparent Data Encryption, TDE), Row Level Security (RLS) and Fine Grained Auditing (FGA).

The first half of the Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs book gives a thorough overview of PL/SQL and everything you should need to know about it, right from the use of semi-colons with statements to using objects, nested table functions, cursors and more.

Data Encryption is given a whole chapter as it covers encrypting and decrypting data, creating keys, passwords, the new TDE (Transparent Data Encryption), MD5 and hashing and how to build your own encryption system.

Row Level Security is discussed in depth and given it’s own chapter to discuss policies, improving performance of RLS and how to troubleshoot RLS. The final three chapters cover fine-grained auditing so all database actions can be tracked and logged, generating random values, such as positive and negative numbers and generating characters, and the final chapter is on scheduling of database tasks using DBMS_JOB and DBMS_SCHEDULER.

Overall Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs is a very good book, the first section covering everything about PL/SQL is worthy of a book for itself, and is not just a section for DBAs, but for developers aswell. There are lots of code examples in Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs and all functions are well described and easy to read and understand.

If you need to know about the main areas of Oracle database encryption, auditing, security or scheduling then this book is definitely for you.