Oracle 12 c Features

Introduction

Oracle 12c is a new database launched by oracle which has upgraded security features and brand new features like advanced index compression, FDA support, index caching, and others. It is maybe designed for organizations and has an optimized performance.

Auditing features in oracle 12c

Oracle 12c has a new unified audit data trail (Pavlovic, & Veselica, 2016).  This enables a selective and more efficient form of auditing by using policies and conditions. This consolidated audit data trail has many advantages, uniquely when integrated with audit mining tools. In the previous releases of the oracle databases, audit trails were separate, and we present as different components. In this latest release, the audit trails are unified into one and are viewable from the UNIFIED_AUDIT_TRAIL data dictionary. This view is available exclusively for the single installation or oracle database real application clusters environment. Unified auditing can enable the user to perform an audit in an entire set of audit data, rather than collecting them and bringing them under a common place to run the analysis.  Audit records can now be gathered from several locations rather than one. This work is done by audit mining tools such as oracle audit vault.

In oracle 12c, unified auditing and conditional auditing is also supported (van Dyk, 2017). Due to this, performance overhead associated with the database auditing is reduced significantly, enabling the user to configure precise, context-dependent logging. This allows a more effective analysis of the logging process. Conditional logging supports highly selective logging policies. This minimizes log entries to specific SQL statements such as CREATE or ALTER actions that originate from outside the system. Other event variables may include programs, periods, and connection types.

Benefits of new audit features

Unified audit trail ensures that the audit information is constant and contains consistent fields. The audit information is consistently formatted for this. The Oracle database has an improved security feature, which can monitor SQL database activity. This can be used to prevent SQL injection attacks on the system (Ceccato, MNguyen, Appelt, & Briand, 2016). Unlike other standard firewalls that perform SQL monitoring at layers 4 and 5, the oracle database can perform analysis of the SQL traffic at layer 7. Also, since the auditing trails are new and upgraded from the previous versions, errors are minimized, and the audit results are mostly accurate.

The importance of the new version

The audit functionality has been redesigned by oracle concerning the functionalities that were used in the previous versions. Also, the oracle 12 database includes a full set of new auditing enhancement features that are automatically available once the database has been installed. As discussed earlier, the previous audit trails were separate. Hence, integrating them as convenient as well as more user friendly.

Conclusion

The new oracle database consists of new features, and upgrades from older features, making it more convenient for use. Along with new auditing features, the existing features of the previous version have been unified. Also, the security measures are much more improved in oracle 21c, with more effective scanning of networks through layer 7, along with monitoring of SQL activities in the system.

References:

Ceccato, M., Nguyen, C. D., Appelt, D., & Briand, L. C. (2016, September). SOFIA: An automated security oracle for black-box testing of SQL-injection vulnerabilities. In 2016 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) (pp. 167-177). IEEE.

Pavlovic, Z., & Veselica, M. (2016). Oracle Database 12c Security cookbook. Packt Publishing Ltd.

van Dyk, H. O. (2017). Developing an audit planning framework at a strategic and operational level for implementing continuous auditing and the corresponding continuous auditing procedures for Oracle database management systems (Doctoral dissertation, Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University).