Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Make a Sad Face..:-( I seemed to have missed my blogs tenth which happened on the 20th September 2014. My last post last year and until very recently was on July 23rd 2014; so actually its been a big gap in blog posts until recently - I have not checked but I suspect it was the biggest gap I have had so far.

My first ever blog post was posted on the 20th September 2004 and was titled - A new Oracle Security based weblog, which introduced the blog. Actually I had been blogging of sorts for about 6 months before that with the individual single articles on their own pages in the Ramblings section of my site but the official first blog was the one quoted above.

So I missed the tenth aniversary by about nine months, so the blog is now about 10 years and 9 months old, so if we factor in the first Ramblings posts mentioned above then I have missed the 11th aniversary as well..:-(

So how well have I posted over the years?, lets have a look in two ways; First number of posts per year and also number of posts per blog year. So how many posts in 2004, 2005, etc and the how many posts from start to first anniversary, to second aniversary.... I will put them together in a table

Post per calendar year:

Year Number Posts
----- ---------------
2004 189
2005 495
2006 296
2007 161
2008 87
2009 78
2010 39
2011 13
2012 6
2013 16
2014 4
2015 3

And posts per blog year:

Blog Year Number Posts
---------- --------------
To Sep 2005 558
To Sep 2006 354
To Sep 2007 184
To Sep 2008 107
To Sep 2009 59
To Sep 2010 72
To Sep 2011 17
To Sep 2012 8
To Sep 2013 14
To Sep 2014 6
To Sep 2015 3

Obviously 2015 is work in progress in both tables. There has been a total of 1383 posts (actually 1386 as three posts have been removed for various reasons). The curves in both tables are different as it peaks in 2005 on pure year and tails off slowley after that. In blog years it peaks in the first year and tails off after that, again slowley. In the first year of blogging I was managing on average almost 1.5 posts per day and in the second year still almost one post per day. As the years roll by the number of blog posts has dropped to almost nothing and in fact the biggest gap in actual posts BUT the number of visits to my companies site continues to grow - more on site stats in a minute.

I recorded the birthdays of my blog from its first birthday until the 5th and then never again until now!. These are here as links:

The First blog birthday
The second blog birthday
The third blog birthday
The fourth blog birthday in
2008
The fifth blog birthday in 2009

And then its this blog post. I do not have a proper historic record of the sites visits since the start but have some snippits in the birthday blogs so here is a summary.

In the first year the number of visits (not hits) went from around 10,000 a month to around 64,000 a month and approximately 0.5 million visits a year. In the second year that grew to around 1.2 million visits a year, in the third year about 1.5 Million visits a year and in the fourth 1.6 Million visits a year and around 4.2 million page views per year. We are now running at around 2.2 million visitors a year, 6.1 million page views a year and an average of around 6,200 visitors per day sometimes peaking around 10,000 visitors in one day.

So it is indeed interesting to see site visits rise while blog posting drops. This is probably due to collateral on the site and partly traction in google although a lot of visits do not eminate from Google so we do have some immunity from Googles fickle rankings.

The stats also show me the most popular pages now and these are in order:

1) How to Grant all Privileges in Oracle
2) Hacking Oracle 12c Common Users
3) which special characters can be used in Oracle database passwords
4) Allowing a user read-only access to stored procedure source code

This is interesting as we have a mix of modern - 12c and older core issues and even a post from the original blog (pre-blog!).

Whats happened in the years between birthdays, 5th and now? well we now have 4 training classes, ranging from auditing Oracle databases, secure coding in PL/SQL, designing audit trails for Oracle and locking down Oracle. All of these classes will be taught from September 21st to 25th here in York at the Holiday Inn, Tadcaster road, York; being taught back to back.

Also in these intervening years we have been busy creating two software products; PFCLScan a useful tool to help you perform a security audit of an Oracle database and PFCLObfuscate, a tool that can be used to protect and lock PL/SQL that you deploy to a database.

Contact us if you would like a demo of either product or to buy a license!