Information Technology, Control, Audit and Security Experience

As an IT control officer or an IT auditor you will at one time have the challenging opportunity of reviewing and evaluating the controls of your organisation's Oracle E-Business suite. This could really be a daunting task mostly if you have NOT been trained on Oracle E-Business suite administration. It can a times, presents itself as a complex application. This was my position at my workplace. I had to research and build a suitable control work plan/audit plan which of course  I will gladly share. Please note that this is compilation based on research and actual experience. I will however appreciate positive and constructive criticism/feedback on this post.

Of course we all know what an Index is and how it is used. We are already familiar with its usage while reading books of large page volumes. We also know how ridiculous it would look to index for example, a 5 page booklet. Well indexing also applies to tables in Oracle database and very much every other databases pout there. Indexes are objects in the database that provides a mapping of all the values in a table column, along with the ROWIDs for all rows in the table that contains the value for the column. A ROWID is a unique identifier for a row in an oracle database table. An example of a rowid is the matriculation number of a student in a particular school. Hence Indexes however are used to make searches on tables faster. It is mostly not needed on a small table as its effect will not be seen. There are 2 types of indexes: ·          B*Tree ·          Bitmap Let’s look at them one...

Have you ever wondered how bank account numbers have been created in such a way that no two people can have the same account number? Better still how about Identity numbers like university matriculation number, staff id or Passport numbers. How are they generated without the possibility of a duplication?  This is made possible because of an object that does the tracking called a SEQUENCE.

In this post I will be sharing with you the basics on how to create and manage views on an oracle database. Views are logical tables based on the images of one or more tables in a database. Views form part of the objects created and managed in a schema. A schema is a collection of all objects owned by a particular user views being one of them When a user is created, the schema for the user is automatically created. Let’s now understand how Views are created and managed. Note  This tutorial will be done using SQLPLUS command prompt. Click here to view this tutorial using Oracle LIVE SQL

In this post I will be sharing with you the basics in table management on an oracle database. Tables are the database segments that organize data in the form of rows and columns. A table forms part of the objects created and managed in a schema. What is a schema? A schema is a collection of all objects owned by a particular user which includes tables When a user is created, the schema for the user is automatically created. As this is a new and blank environment, the new user will not have any objects (i.e. tables etc) unless it is created. Let’s now understand how tables are created and managed. Note  This tutorial will be done using SQLPLUS command prompt. Click here to view this tutorial using Oracle LIVE SQL

In today's blog post we will be looking at how data is arraigned and stored in the database.  An Improperly o rganized   data could reduce the database integrity or negatively impact on its performance.  This arrangement can be likened to an organogram (Organisations hierarchy structure)  where we have segmentation like: - Groups - Departments - Units - Teams - Staff (this being the smallest unit) Now that the concept is clear let us get busy.....

“The Captain of a plane that knows nothing about the mechanical parts of his plane would eventually crash it one day.” I believe it would be nice to introduce you to the inner workings of the Oracle database. This would be useful to the intending DBA, audit or control officer and finally the ordinary enthusiast. You cannot effectively manage the oracle database if you don’t know how it processes data and presents information to you. So let’s get busy………