Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

The 21st anniversary of this blog is coming up on the 20th September 2025. I started this blog on the 20th of September 2004 and it has been doing well ever since. I write almost exclusively on the subject of Oracle Security; occasionally I might go off topic and discuss anniversaries or similar and I have talked about coding in C or Lua or PL/SQL. I recent times I discussed creating a compiler or interpreter in PL/SQL for a simple language based initially on BASIC but quickly changed to a different language. You can find the posts on that series via the blog archives page. Even those posts on creating a compiler for me actually have a security angle as we are adding a version of that in our PFCLObfuscate product that can be used to protect PL/SQL. The idea being that it adds a layer of complexity to PL/SQL code and makes it harder for someone to steal or understand especially when it is also obfuscated.

My blog has 1611 posts at this point of writing, actually 1612 including this post.

The blogs have had an array of subjects BUT almost 99% in the area of Oracle security; please have a look at some of the historic posts to see what I mean. We cover all aspects of Oracle database security, secure coding in PL/SQL, protecting PL/SQL, audit trails and also forensics but also delved into GDPR in the database and lost of subjects in between but all on Oracle security.

I think I am the longest running blog on Oracle Security and also probably quite unique. In the past there have been others who focused on Oracle Security and there are some who still occasionally do post on Oracle security BUT their blogs are not dedicated to the sole subject of Oracle Security.

Blogging started in 1997 and there were few people doing it then before blogging became much more popular. Wordpress was launched in 2003, just a short while before I started blogging. I used the Greymatter software that was released in 2000. My blog was there not at the start of Oracle blogging but soon after. At that time Brian Duff ran a site called OraBlogs that is now defunct that listed Oracle related blogs in one place for people. The site was down by the start of 2006 as Brian moved to Oracle and started to encourage Oracle blogs to collate on an Oracle domain. During the time from me starting to blog on Oracle and security I rose up the rankings on his site and ended up at number 1 position of Oracle blogs for a short period before the site was gone


My journey in blogging did not start with this blog. For a time before the first actual blog post I posted articles on my Ramblings section.

In the first year of this blog my site visits (not hits) went from around 10,000 a month to about 64,000 a month and approximately 0.5 Million visits in a year. Now as i write this we get around 225,000 visits a month and around 7,500 on average every day with peaks some times above 10,000 a day and some rarer times about 21,000 a day. We get around 2.3 million visits a month. So for me it is worth continuing this blog journey as a lot of people still visit and read what I say. Of course we are also now in a social media world and I have around 45,000 connections/followers on all of the main channels and we post there many times per week also.

In a similar fashion to Orablogs all those years ago there are lists on feedspot of blogs that are of interest. The top 100 Oracle blogs has me at position 6 and the top 70 database blogs on feedspot has me at position 13

My first blog post was A new Oracle security based weblog was basically a welcome to my blog and what I plan to write about and when.

Please keep visiting and reading what I have to say about Oracle and Security. I have written an off-line tool called PFCLSocial that i use to write drafts of blogs and I have quite a few stacked up. I might do a post about PFCLSocial at some point in the future.

Thanks for reading for 21 years

#oracleace #sym_42 #oracle #database #security #tools #software #training #products #blogging #birthday