Locked Up TightLocked Up Tight

Oracle stands behind some of the largest databases in use today. The company's database and management-system software supports Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology's 222.8-terabyte beauty and likewise stores and organizes the 100.4 terabytes of data Yahoo needs to serve its content-hungry users.

Oracle wouldn't have been tapped for such massive undertakings without offering a level of security that matched or surpassed competitors IBM, Microsoft, and Sybase. Since Oracle introduced 9i about four years ago, its database has been able to monitor for suspicious activity. Oracle Database Enterprise Edition does this by checking database access records for information about the frequency and type of data requests and looking for anomalies. By searching for database activity after hours or by users who shouldn't have an interest in certain types of data, Oracle offers a "fine-grained auditing capability," says Paul Needham, Oracle's director of product management for database security.

Encryption plays an important role in the security of databases and the data they manage. With 10gR2, Oracle introduced its transparent data-encryption capability integrated as part of the database when customers pay for the advanced security option. Oracle 10gR2 prevents users and administrators from tampering with audit logs, which are crucial to regulatory compliance. Previous versions of the database provided the person who registered it with access to the audit log, but the latest version of the software writes directly to the system log. Not even the person in whose name the database is registered can change this log data.