Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

It seems like an evening for reading non Oracle security papers. I seem to do this from time to time...:-). I like to read any technical paper especially those with internals info on Oracle as it is good to learn about as much of Oracles functionality as I can. It is amazing that I can read a paper that has nothing at all to do with security and I can find myself creating parallels or finding new possible security issues. I think security pops up in anything. If you want to stay secure with your Oracle databases then you cannot simply read papers or books with Oracle security in the title! To secure Oracle or indeed any software you need to understand that software and how it functions.

I saw Doug's paper mentioned in his blog entry posted on Saturday titled http://doug.burns.tripod.com/oracle/index.blog?entry_id=1099131 - (broken link) Getting it right. The paper is called http://doug.burns.tripod.com/px.pdf - (broken link) Tuning parallel execution and is a well written paper that covers the parallel execution features in the database. The paper starts off with some history and then a discussion of the architecture. It then considers configuration via the parallel parameters and then talks about the relevant dictionary views, monitoring the parallel adaptive multi-user algorithm, monitoring the SQL executed by slaves, a good discussion of tracing and wait events, finally Doug closes with some common sense. This is a good paper for those who do not know much about the parallel features. I have got and have read the O'Reilly book "Oracle Parallel Processing" by Tushar Mahapatra and Sanjay Mishra some years ago. This book was not too bad for an overview but is dated now. This new paper by Doug is a good start to parallel features.