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  • Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certified Associate Study Guide

    That is a long title! and is the title of my newest book… very happy and feels so good to hold the author copy of the book!

    It's a big book :-)
    Feeling Happy!

    There are many people who directly and indirectly helped with the book. I thank each one from the bottom of my heart.

    I had a wonderful publishing team from Sybex (Wiley) to work on this project – Jeff Kellum (Acquisition Editor), Lisa Bishop (Development Editor), Dassi Zeidal (Production Editor), Kathy Grider-Carlyle (Copy Editor) and Pete Gaughan (Editorial Manager). All are great people personally, and exceptional in what they do! Thank you very much…

    I am very fortunate to have my good friends and leaders in the Oracle technology space do the technical review of the book. Both are recipients of coveted “DBA of the Year” award and Oracle ACE Directors. Thank you Arup Nanda and Syed Jaffer Hussain for your invaluable input and suggestions.

    Thank you Gavin Powell for helping me with a chapter…

    My sincere thanks to all who helped throughout, professionally and personally!
    Thank you!

    I hope this books helps the DBAs looking forward to Oracle Database 12c OCA certification. Sybex will be releasing the OCP study guide and the kit soon…

    Good luck with your certification aspirations…

     

    This book and my previous books are listed on Amazon.

     

     

    Dedicated to who dedicated their time for me, not expecting anything in return!
    Dedication!

     

     

     

    I will be updating additional material to help with 12c certification in the coming days on my blog… Connect me to your circle using any social media you are comfortable with…

     

     

     

    OCA_12c_Cover
    Check out the book on Amazon!

     

    Twitter: @biju_thomas (all technical interactions)

    Face Book Page: OracleNotes (all tweets as well as photo albums, technical shares from facebook)

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    Google Plus: Circles (not actively using Google yet, blog posts are announced)

     

     

    Or use the following contact form to connect to me personally to discuss on 12c certification in general or about the book…

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  • OracleDB12c New Feature: Unified Auditing

    Unified Auditing is a new feature introduced in Oracle Database 12c, to streamline and standardize all audit trail information. The traditional auditing architectures involve many audit-trail locations and tables to review information for the auditors, and do not follow a standard. Every new product introduced in the database had to essentially have a new audit table because the AUD$ table is limited. The Oracle Unified Audit feature introduced in Oracle Database 12c addresses these issues and gives a standard interface and single location for the audit trail.

    Unified Auditing is a database option and is not enabled by default. The following query shows if Unified Auditing is enabled or not.

    SQL> SELECT VALUE FROM V$OPTION
     WHERE PARAMETER = 'Unified Auditing';

VALUE
----------
FALSE

    To enable Unified Auditing, shut down the database and listener, and then relink the oracle executable using the following options:

    cd $ORACLE_HOME /rdbms/lib

make -f ins_rdbms.mk uniaud_on ioracle ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME

    Unified Auditing is managed by creating and enabling audit policies. Unified audit-trail records can be read using the UNIFIED_AUDIT_TRAIL view. This view includes audit records from standard and fine-grained auditing, along with auditing of data pump, SQL loader, database vault, label security, recovery manager, and real application security products.

    Oracle Database 12c has two roles to support Unified Auditing. The AUDIT_ADMIN role has privileges to create, alter, and drop audit policies. It also has privileges to enable or disable audit policies for each business requirement, to view audit records, and to clean up the audit trail. The AUDIT_VIEWER role is for users who only need to view the audit-trail contents. Unified Auditing is owned by AUDSYS user, not SYS user.

    Privilege auditing in traditional auditing has to be enabled by setting the AUDIT_SYS_OPERATIONS=true. The audit records are written to operating system files. With Unified Auditing, privilege audit is enabled by default and can be queried using the same UNIFIED_AUDIT_TRAIL view. In a unified audit database, the following actions are audited mandatory without any policy:

    • CREATE AUDIT POLICY
    • ALTER AUDIT POLICY
    • DROP AUDIT POLICY
    • AUDIT
    • NOAUDIT
    • EXECUTE of DBMS_FGA
    • EXECUTE of DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT

    Read more at
    http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16655_01/network.121/e17607/audit_admin.htm#DBSEG1026

    http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16655_01/server.121/e17609/tdpsg_auditing.htm#TDPSG50000