Oracle Essentials, 4th Edition

Chapter 6. Oracle Security, Auditing, and Compliance

The primary purpose of Oracle database software is to manage the valuable data that lies at the core of virtually every operation in your organization. Part of the value of that data is that the data is yours—the data that can be used to give your company unique advantages. For this reason, you need to protect your data from others who should not have access to it. This protection is the subject of this chapter. Here we focus on three different aspects of the overall task of protecting your data:

• Security covers the tools that you use to allow access only to those people you designate.

• Auditing allows you to discover who did what with your data. Auditing is the process of creating a history of access that can be used to understand database operations as well as spot access violations and attempts. When you are configuring Oracle Database 11g, you will be asked if you want to keep the default security settings. If you do, auditing will be enabled and a new default password profile option will be in place. A number of other database initialization parameters will be reset at this time.

• Compliance is the ability to prove that your data is secure and reliable—a proof that is now legally required in many cases. Although compliance may strike many technical folks as overkill, the simple fact is that a lack of compliance alone may result in significant penalties to your company. Compliance is thus a topic of great interest to management. ...