LATEST POSTS


  • Oracle Update Advisor

    Oracle Update Advisor

    Oracle has been working since April 2026 with frontier AI models, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s most advanced models through Trusted Access for Cyber, to find vulnerabilities across the database stack before adversaries can weaponise them. That collaboration changes the arithmetic of patching for every DBA who runs more than a handful of homes.…

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  • Oracle Database Security Central

    Oracle Database Security Central

    If you already run Audit Vault and Database Firewall and just found out Oracle now calls something “Database Security Central,” this post answers the question you probably have first: is this a new thing to buy, or is it what AVDF becomes? Since this question tends to come with two more attached to it, I…

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  • Managing TDE Encryption Keys Across a Hybrid Data Guard Estate: External Keystores and Cross-Region Key Replication

    Managing TDE Encryption Keys Across a Hybrid Data Guard Estate: External Keystores and Cross-Region Key Replication

    When your primary lives on on-premises Exadata and your standby sits in a different region or cloud, the hardest part of Transparent Data Encryption is not the encryption itself. It is deciding where the master key lives, how both sides reach it, and what happens to that key when you fail over. This is the…

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  • EBCDIC Compatibility in Oracle 26ai: The Mainframe Re-Platforming Bridge

    EBCDIC Compatibility in Oracle 26ai: The Mainframe Re-Platforming Bridge

    Special thanks to Virginia Arroyo, Oracle Cloud Migration Director, for her review of this article. There is a quiet assumption baked into almost every modern database conversation, and it goes something like this: everything is Unicode now, so encoding is a solved problem. For most greenfield systems, that is more or less true. But walk…

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  • Exadata X11MV: 50% More VM Density and What It Means for Your Cloud Exadata Consolidation Strategy

    Exadata X11MV: 50% More VM Density and What It Means for Your Cloud Exadata Consolidation Strategy

    I’ve been tracking the Exadata Cloud Infrastructure release notes for a while now, and the June 30 entry caught my attention in a way that went beyond the usual quarterly feature list. Oracle has quietly released a new infrastructure generation for Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure that changes the consolidation math for a lot…

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  • Exadata Exascale on AWS: Oracle’s Answer to Hybrid Cloud Database Performance

    Exadata Exascale on AWS: Oracle’s Answer to Hybrid Cloud Database Performance

    Oracle’s recent announcement of Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure (ExaDB-XS) changes the landscape for database administrators by making Exadata’s advanced features available without the traditional high upfront costs. This service operates as a consumption-based model within AWS, allowing users to access Exadata’s optimized performance at minimal initial investment. The shared architecture offers the same…

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