Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design Book Review

Design and Administer a Rock Solid Security Plan for Your Oracle Database

Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design contains a whole range of tips and tricks on how to keep your Oracle 10g database as secure as possible. The amount of code examples in Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design is truly amazing, which demonstrates that this book is not just about boring text but actually includes a lot of good hands on examples which can be used on your Oracle database.

Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design begins with a good chapter about general security best practices, this includes such topics as creating security policies and the chapter includes a number of steps to follow in order to help secure the operating system, the network and the application server.

The second chapter takes you through securing the database, there are some good sections on checking for weak or default passwords and how to manage and ensure good passwords are used.

Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design also covers connection pools and proxy authentication, identity management and privileges and roles. The book also discusses identification and authentication for web applications.

There is a great chapter about how to set up auditing for accountability. If you need to know who has changed data in the Oracle database then there are many ways to go about it such as using an application based example with procedures and triggers or by using standard database auditing and fine grained auditing – well Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design will show you how to go about all these methods.

Other areas of the book Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design include implementing fine-grained access controls with views, setting up row level security with virtual private databases, oracle label security and finally a chapter on database encryption and the DATA_CRYPTO package which makes use of the DBMS_CRYPTO function which tries to simplify the encryption and decryption calls.

Overall Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design is a great book on Oracle Security and it’s very detailed with a lot of code examples. If you administer an Oracle database that needs to be highly secure then I recommend you buy this book and read it.