Advanced Security Option Gotcha

Here is nice little licensing anomaly. Advanced Security Option (ASO) implements, among other things the 'identified globally' clause of 'create user'. It is an Enterprise Edition option, and an EE option generally means big bucks.

However it looks as if using 'identified externally' with Windows domain accounts counts as 'identified globally'.

select name,
       currently_used, 
       last_usage_date 
from   dba_feature_usage_statistics 
where  name like 'Advanced Security';

NAME               CURRE LAST_USAGE_DATE
------------------ ----- --------------------
Advanced Security  FALSE 19-MAY-2007 01:03:06

create user MYDOMAIN\JIM identifed externally;

You now have to wait for the feature audit job to run to pick up the new feature. The job appears to run weekly. If you know how to force a feature audit, please let me know.

Once the job has run, if you rerun the query, you can see that the Advanced Security Option is enabled, and you could be in breach of your license.

select name,
       currently_used, 
       last_usage_date 
from   dba_feature_usage_statistics 
where  name like 'Advanced Security';

NAME               CURRE LAST_USAGE_DATE     
------------------ ----- --------------------
Advanced Security  TRUE  26-MAY-2007 23:44:07 

My current client has only a few databases on windows, and does not generally use external authentication, but each windows server has a couple of service accounts for backups and other operations and these are normally externally authenticated domain accounts.

Beware.

Symantec releases Veritas Storage Foundation as freeware

Symantec have release a version of Veritas Storage Foundation as freeware. It seems to be aimed at small businesses running small servers as it is limited to creating 4 volumes / file systems and will only run on 2 processor machines.

It is available for Solaris 8,9,10 (SPARC), Solaris 10 (x64), AIX 5.2,5.3, RHEL4 (XEON/EM64T/Opteron/Itanium 2), SLES 9,10 (XEON/EM64T/Opteron/Itanium 2) and Windows 2000 and 2003.

This is good news for small companies as the licence cost of Storage Foundation used to be a significant overhead. If you are buying commodity hardware and putting a free operating system on it, then the $1000 or so SF used to cost is significant.

It is also good news for me as it means that my home lab set up can now include even more software I am likely to use at client sites.

More on this when I have tried it out.

OTN Single sign-on is forever

I've recently given up an old email address which I no longer used, except as my contact point for OTN. This meant that I also had to give up my OTN account because the security software for OTN does not let you change your email address. It doesn't matter that much, but it means I have lost all my brownie points and my little gold medal for being an active user.

It is very annoying however. The forum software they use allows email addresses to be changed out of the box but they have modified it to disable this. I thought at first it was part of the move to a single sign-on approach to bring it in to line with metalink where your email address is your userid. But no, metalink allows you to change your email address even though it your userid.

And don't get me started on the fact that you can't change your password either.

The "Editor-in-Chief" of OTN says it is out of his hands.

Tags:

• oracle
• otn

Fear of 11i

I'm not looking forward to 11i.

I'm sure there will be all sorts of exciting new features designed to make me redundant, but the main reason is that I'll have to upgrade my lab machines.

Each new version has increased the minumum hardware requirements, but it is usually possible to run Oracle below the minimum requirements if all you are doing is single user experimentation. There are exceptions though. I tried to run Grid Control on a machine with 512MB of RAM (the recommended minimum is 1024MB) and I spent more time dealing with OC4J crashes than tring out grid control.

Most of my lab machines are so old that they are not worth upgrading - either they are at the maximum RAM or the RAM is no longer readily available.

When I finally bite the bullet, I will probably invest in something big and state of the art which can support at least 2 VMWare virtual machines concurrently.

Tags:

• oracle
• vmware
• virtualisation