Meet Peter and Jelle Peter and Jelle, two junior Oracle database engineers at Monin, each with their own journey. Where Peter, 25 years old, already had some work experience in marketing automation, he had no experience with databases at all. Peter searched for a vacancy which better fitted his personality, talents and interests and not…
History Since December 2015, Oracle released Oracle Standard Edition 2 (SE2), replacing the previous Standard Edition (SE) and Standard Edition One (SE1) releases. Customers on versions before 12.1.0.2 (running Standard Edition or Standard Edition One (SE1)), and who want to upgrade to a more recent version, will have to switch to Standard Edition Two (SE2)….
Again 4 new execution side-channel vulnerabilities were disclosed by Intel on May 14th. Each of them has its own name but collectively they are referred as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (mds): CVE-2019-11091: Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM): part of RIDL CVE-2018-12126: Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling (MSBDS): part of Fallout CVE-2018-12127: Microarchitectural Load Port Data…
Last update: March 15th 2019 The last few months, there was a lot to do about Java and the fact that future usage would only be allowed via subscription. But what is it all about? And do you really need to buy a subscription for Java? A bit of history From the beginning of Java,…
Within Microsoft SQL Server databases, some fixed server-level roles are defined, providing a certain level of access and functionality. The role with the highest access and functionality is the SYSADMIN role. Only privileged users or administrators within the company are granted this role. Eddy Van Heghe, one of our experienced Microsoft SQL DBA’s, discovered a…
After the Spectre & Meltdown vulnerabilities (see https://monin-it.be/2018/01/17/meltdown-spectre-solution-linux-windows/) at the beginning of 2018, Intel now tackled 3 applications of another big vulnerability in their microcode: the L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) vulnerabilities. All three applications of L1TF are speculative execution side channel cache timing vulnerabilities: CVE-2018-3615: Affecting Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX): CVSS score 7.9/10 CVE-2018-3620:…
Oracle just released a security alert and is urging users to patch their oracle database installations to plug a critical security issue (this one even got CVSS score 9.9/10, which is really high and shows the importance to patch). The vulnerability can result in complete compromise of the Oracle Database and shell access to the…
UPDATED November 2018 On February 15th 2018 Oracle published note 2361478.1 (“Oracle Databases Need to be Patched to a Minimum Patchset/PSU/RU level before April 2019”), stating that database versions prior to 12.1.0.2 (except for 11.2.0.4) will need additional patching in order to be able to use database links after April 2019. This caused some confusion…
IMPORTANT UPDATE (January 31st 2018): both hardware and software vendors released patches for the Metldown and Spectre vulnerabilities. However, after a while they all found out the performance impact was bigger than expected. In some cases the patched systems even started to reboot unexpectedly from time to time. That’s why most vendors ask to wait…
Since the early days Oracle started to work with versions identified by sequential numbers: 2, 3, etc… until version 12c now. Each version has several releases, containing new features and bug fixes (like 12c Release 1 and 12c Release 2). Both versions and releases come available when Oracle thinks they’re stable and reliable for production…
