Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I just came across a news post titled "SmartDB Upgrades Oracle Migration Tool" that discusses the fact that SmartDB Corp has released version 10 of its workbench for integrators to do Oracle migrations and updates. The tool also allows data to be cleansed.

This post interested me first because it was about automated migrations and I have worked on many migrations in the past, using Shell scripts, awk, sed, C programs and Pro*C programs. I have worked on migrations of data from legacy systems and also of applications from one version to another but mainly I worked on defining, designing, cleaning, moving and testing data. This is quite an interesting area of work. But the second reason I was interested b y this news post was because of this quote from Scott Conway :-

"Previously, you had an open interface and direct access to the database. But the latest version of Oracle, 11.5.10, adds a database API loader." The API loader makes it easier to address security issues in data-transfer operations, but, he said, it makes it harder to control the quality of the data."

This is an interesting issue. The article is talking about Oracle Applications but the issue applies to all legacy systems and migrations of the data. The data that is being migrated, whether its still in the legacy system, the new Oracle database or somewhere in between or indeed being reported on is still production data and needs to be secured with as much effort as the data is when it is in the Oracle database itself. Remember when securing Oracle that data is not static, it finds itself appearing in many locations. Take time to understand data and how then to secure it.