Experiments in Geekery

The beta exam consists of 85 questions and 230 minutes, including 5 minutes pre- and post- for some questions. There's not much information out there at the moment about this exam other than this guide . I completed the exam today, and out of the 230 minutes available I used about 130m (2h 10m) to go through all 85 questions and double-check my answers on questions I flagged. I could have spent longer going over some answers but after 2 hours+ in a room with a noisy air conditioning unit, I was struggling. Sadly, results aren't available immediately for beta exams, with results being made available around 90 days after the end of the beta period (which is today!), so I've no idea how well I did. What I can talk about is what the exam was made up of. It was not as bad as I expected it to be, given that I had all of 3 days to prepare for this (I asked my manager to approve the expense in early December, they only got back to me this week and the beta period ends today!)...

I've wanted to do this for a long time, but now a migration project to both a new data centre, and a new version of Oracle means I have opportunity to do it and hopefully, do it right. The current database design is not perfect.  There is one application user which is used by apps, users, support and development teams.  At the moment, there is no way to separate traffic, prevent connections from people to the wrong place or from unexpected places, or to do resource limiting.  I can't do any sensible auditing. This changes as of the migration to 12c.  I have defined 7 different services, which will all have different sets of expected users.  After logon triggers will be set up so that all connections to the controlled services have the connection source IP and database username checked.  If either isn't appropriate for the service, the connection attempt is logged and the connection terminated. CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER SYSTEM.check_service_appropriate...