Oracle Magazine - September/October 2007 - Marcelo Machado

BOB ADLER
at OracleINTERVIEW
Change Assurance
Oracle Database 11g helps customers manage change.
ndy Mendelsohn, senior vice
president of Database Server
Technologies at Oracle, sat
down with Oracle Magazine to
talk about new technologies and innovations
in Oracle Database 11g. The following
is an excerpt from that interview.
To download a podcast of the full
interview, visit otn.oracle.com/
syndication/magcasts.
Oracle Magazine: Most organizations
today are faced with a variety
of regulatory compliance issues as
well as security challenges. How
does Oracle Database 11g address
these issues?
Mendelsohn: One of our new
enhancements is that we’re
encrypting large objects [LOBs]
transparently in Oracle Database
11g. We’re also doing encryption
at the whole tablespace level.
So if you want to just go in and
encrypt everything, we make it
easy to do that.
We also have Oracle Audit
Vault, which targets security and
compliance. Oracle Audit Vault
consolidates audit trails from different
source databases into a
central data warehouse, which
makes it easier for auditors to
understand the security-relevant
operations in a company.
Oracle Magazine: Tell us about the flashback
data archive feature for compliance
in Oracle Database 11g.
Mendelsohn: Flashback data archive lets
you go back in time indefinitely. With
flashback data archive, you can set up
an archive on any table, and whenever
any updates are made to a table, we
record those updates and we keep the
old versions of every row that’s been
updated. You can run queries as of a
point in time in the past, but now the
point in time can be years in the past,
which can be very useful for things
like auditing.
Oracle Magazine: By some estimates, the
volume of corporate data is growing
three times larger every two years,
which dramatically increases storage
For Andy Mendelsohn, Senior Vice President of Database Server
Technologies at Oracle, the Real Application Testing feature in Oracle
Database 11g is the most exciting new technology.
costs. How does Oracle Database 11g
address this issue?
Mendelsohn: Storage vendors have an
initiative called information lifecycle
management [ILM]. When you have
information that’s really active, you
need the highest-performance storage
out there. But, as the data becomes
more historical in nature, the highperformance
storage isn’t needed. All
the storage vendors now have different
levels of storage, at different price
points. Oracle has a technology called
partitioning that has been used mostly
BY RICH SCHWERIN
for managing very large databases,
often in a time-based fashion. It turns
out that partitioning works perfectly
for implementing an ILM strategy. You
can basically have a set of tablespaces
that are defined on different classes of
storage, and then as the data ages out,
you create a set of time-based
partitions for your table. So,
let’s say it’s the order table. As
the orders start aging out, you
just implement partitioning
by time stamp on the order,
and when the orders get more
than a few months old, you
start moving them onto partitions
with lower-cost storage,
and over time even lower-cost
storage, until ultimately you
either drop them or archive
them completely.
Oracle Magazine: People are
storing all kinds of things
in databases today that they
didn’t used to—documents,
images, multimedia. How does
Oracle Database 11g address
this issue?
Mendelsohn: In Oracle Database
11g, Oracle SecureFiles is a
whole new implementation
of our LOB infrastructure,
and we rearchitected it for really high
performance. The performance of the
Oracle Database 11g LOB implementation
for just reading and writing LOBs
in the database is up to five times faster.
Oracle SecureFiles actually reads and
writes documents and files in the database
faster than outside the database,
which is a real eye-opener for customers.
And the Oracle SecureFiles infrastructure
underlies all of our support for
rich datatypes like spatial, multimedia,
and XML. We are very sensitive to the
amount of storage these documents
ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 23