Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Wow, its been around a week since i last wrote here. I was on client work all last week, indeed i have been snowed under for quite a while so finding time for blogging is hard. I had promised myself to find half an hour most days and did this for most of November but this has fallen by the wayside due to work and company business. I am going to try and keep to this promise though over coming weeks; I do have a growing list of things I would like to cover here.

The week before last I was in Birmingham at the UKOUG conference speaking on the Monday to quite a well attended room - which was good as i was on at the same time as Steven Feuerstein and Jonathan Lewis (two seperate talks by them of course). The talk went well, at least I thought so. I also then chaired the Oracle security round table session which had some good discussions but was down on attendance over pervious years; not sure if thats a clash with other sessions or simply that there were less people at the conference this year.

I was in London last week teaching for a client and I had planned to meet Paul Wright for a chat but he had man flu and was at home in bed so was unable to meet up. So i ended up catching a tube to Leicester Square and wandering around down Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road so obviously I ended up in Foyles book shop. I picked up a copy of Norbert Debes book published by Apress "Secrets of the Oracle Database (Expert's Voice in Oracle) " and also Tim Halls book "Oracle Job Scheduling: Creating Robust Task Management with dbms_job and Oracle 10g dbms_scheduler " which was very cheap, eleven quid. I have niot read either yet but i am aware of Norberts book and had seen some of the content before it became an Apress book as Norbert asked me to review and write the forward but at the time i simply just could not fit it in but it was nice to see that Norbert thanked me in the acknowledgements. I always like Tim's writings, he is very thourough and his writing style is excellent always with good clear examples. I will need to find time to go through each book now.

I also spent an hour yesterday evening after work sorting the code downloads for the new book - Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table which is due for release soon. I am looking forward to seeing it in print.

I have uploaded the slides for my talk at the UKOUG in Birmingham recently. As usual the slides are available from my Oracle Security white papers page.