Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I saw a few tweets yesterday about Joel Kallman and liked a few and shared one (maybe two) and then I saw Tim Halls post that talked about Joel Kallman day. I decided to do a quick blog now to support this event that Tim has been running even though it ended yesterday; Sorry, I could not do it yesterday. ##

I didn't know Joel well and we had met and spoken at least 3 times over the years but possibly more, I just cannot recall exactly; two occasions I do remember. The first time we spoke in person was at DOAG a few years ago. I was there with a reseller of our scanner PFCLScan and was doing demos on the Loopback stand there. Joel came up to me and introduced himself and shook my hang vigorously and said "you are a Rockstar; but don't tell anyone in Oracle I said that" and he had a broad smile. We chatted for a while and I was immediately struck by his absolute friendliness and his great attitude to everyone around and the "subject" of Oracle in general; he was a great person.

I then spoke to Joel again after that at a UKOUG event where he came to find me because he had heard through the grape vine that I was going to include an exploit in Apex in my talk of that day. The grape vine wasn't strictly true. Yes I was going to use Apex as an example of a problem but it was not a bug in the traditional sense in Apex. The issue was that the full design implementation of Apex includes a lot of rights for the APEX_% schema and I was going to show a issue of how a privilege can be stolen. Joel was very gracious and courteous even before I explained my talks example. He was a great person, very friendly. We then talked about all sorts of things (all related to Oracle of course) and even about the key design decision in the core of Apex to use DBMS_SYS_SQL.

I definitely remember speaking to Joel somewhere else but I cannot remember now where or the details.

Great guy, sadly missed and a fantastic ambassador for Oracle.

#JoelKallmanDay #oracle #security #oracleace @oracleace @groundbreakers @OracleDatabase @OracleAPEX #orclapex @OracleSQLDev