The Triora Group

Yesterday as I was walking my dogs, I spotted a little bit of “little boy heaven”: two slugs – really big slugs – slithering on my hillside. I did the only thing a reallly cool Mommy could do under the circumstances – I ran back to the house and dragged my son out of bed, made him get the camera and set off to enjoy the world of slugs.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with the Oracle E-Business Suite of Applications? Well, first off, I can honestly say that I was as excited about this discovery as I was when I read that 10gR2 Version 10.2.0.4 is now certified with Release 11i. I hear there are performance improvements as well as functionality improvements to be had with this new release, so I highly recommend that my E-Business Suite friends consider upgrading.

But back to the slugs…

I have to admit, I was curious to see if my dogs would eat the slugs, and was disappointed to discover that while my dog will eat the pillar of my house, the thorns off of my rose bushes, and empty milk jugs, he will not eat slugs. Of course, this made me think about the exciting announcement that DB Vault 10gR2 is now certified with the E-Business Suite. I’m sure it was not the intent of the article writer to make it look like we DBAs are all an evil lot trying to sneak forbidden access to our companies’ financial data, but I did get a laugh out of this picture that I snagged from Steven Chan’s blog that showed that with Database Vault, only the FIN Realm Owner gets to peek at this precious data, while the DBA is unable to get to the data. So for all you DBAs, peeking can now be officially restricted.

For what it’s worth, the intent of Database Vault is to protect data from insider attacks and help meet SOX requirements for privacy and segregation of duties. I think the picture below gives a better idea of the sort of ne’er-do-wells that we are after. And for what it’s worth, DBAs aren’t the only people in your company who might like to see your data, so I’ve coined a new role for companies: The Insider Slug:

Now, you might say to yourself that you work with a great bunch of people, none of whom could ever make the ranks of The Insider Slug. But my cousin Anne Marie once gave this pearl of wisdom, after spending years consulting with newspaper companies. She said that she would go in to review their systems, and the newspaper owners would always say that there was no way that anyone was stealing from them. And Anne Marie and her husband Bill would pore over the records and at the end of their visit give the owner a list of who was stealing, and how much. To this day, Anne Marie says that if you run a company that doesn’t have checks and balances in place, or that does, but doesn’t follow them, then you should assume that somebody in the company is stealing you blind.

If only The Insider Slugs were so easy to spot

Smart companies use auditing to watch for cases where The Insider Slugs have found a way past security firewalls. And smarter companies put measures in place like Database Vault to keep those slugs from getting to their data in the first place.

And now, to finish the story of the slugs…

In the world of this really cool Mommy, I sometimes have to accept some uncomfortable liaisons in my life, so I steeled myself for the likelihood that we would become slug pet owners that night. In fact, I found two more slugs, bringing us to a total of four. They were very big, and not particularly good looking, but we diligently photographed the slugs and then my son, after considerable experimentation, used two sticks as chopsticks to pick up the slugs and put them in a box (yes, we did haul them out of the box and pose them on a rock).

Our slug box is kept handy for occasions like this. Last week we used the box to bring in two toads for overnight guests. We’ve put an awful lot of thought and research into what kind of food would be appealing to toads, but so far have not hit the mark, so toads are only allowed as overnight guests.

Ultimately, the slugs made it into our aquarium, which is filled with slimy dirt from the backyard. I thought the adventure was over, but my husband reviewed the slug habitat situation and concluded that putting a book on top of the aquarium would not be sufficient to keep the slugs where we wanted. Out came the slug box, and the slugs were returned to the wild, with a brief argument about whether putting them on the porch was sufficient, or if they should be taken back to where we found them, with side comments from my husband about what we normally do to slugs in our garden.

With all this said, I’ll just finish up by pointing out a few important observations:

1. One should probably not assume that Insider Slugs always work by themselves. My slugs looked ready to form a conga line.
2. Our slugs were quite slimy and left a trail behind them. I am not convinced that Insider Slugs are so obvious or easy to spot.
3. I can’t emphasize enough how tickled I was that my son used sticks to pick up the slugs rather than grabbing them with his bare hands. It’s bad enough when toads pee on him, I’d just as soon not see slug slime on him.

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