Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I just got the book Oracle Insights - Tales of the Oak table published by Apress / Oak Table Press (ISBN 1-59059-387-1) from Amazon this morning which I ordered some time back. The book is written by a good number of well known Oracle guru's and Oak table members. Each chapter is written by a different person. The book is based around horror stories that the authors have encountered when implementing, fixing, tuning Oracle databases. I have read the intro this morning and I also have completely read the chapter by Kyle Hailey - chapter 6 - "Direct memory access" with interest. As i said previously being interested in securing Oracle should not mean just reading about security exclusively. There are other areas of interested to a security person. For me these include internals, undocumented stuff about Oracle and useful utilities like trace, dumps or debuggers.

I didn't realise that this book also covers the issue of direct memory access to the SGA when i ordered it so this is a bonus to me. The material is very similar to Kyles paper and also Miladin Modrakovic's follow up paper.

As you will remember i talked about the same subject a couple or so days ago when i read about it in the new Oracle wait interface book published on Oracle press. The difference with the tales of the Oak table book is that the chapter is written by Kyle himself. The description and explanation is very useful and interesting. The chapter also is great as it gives credit to the initial author of a DMA SGA program Roger Sanders and talks about how it came about and how Kyle wrote his version of Rogers m2 program.