Archive for August, 2005
ceteris paribus
A long time ago, I took a first degree in Economics at the University of Bristol. Apart from explaining my tendency to waffle, and my desire to see theories backed up by evidence, it was where I first came across the latin ceteris paribus.
This phrase translates roughly ‘all else the same’ and is used in thought or math experiments by economists to imagine all other variables being artificially held constant in order to investigate the effect of a particular input variable on some complex system.
It cropped up again today in a discussion on the merits of linux vs windows as an underlying OS for Oracle databases. The problem of course is that all else isn’t the same. It is extraordinarily rare these days to have two systems that are close enough to each other to compare let alone imagine that windows vs linux as an os represents a single discreet change.
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For my Australian Friends
Curious
If anyone else has downloaded the 10g Release 2 Developer Preview for Windows (aka beta 3 so far as I can tell) have you had any joy recreating the general purpose db – my creation fails because the restore of the users tablespace fails. I’m curious as to whether I got a bad download or it is repeatable error.
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Connected Thinking
I noticed on Chris Foot’s blog, and confirmed by way of the readme, that in 10gR2 the CONNECT role has been neutered.
Historically I, and many others, have advocated the banning of the CONNECT and RESOURCE roles, instead recommending using user-created roles or granting required privileges directly to user accounts. The CONNECT role has been a particular bug bear since it rather suggests that it allows a user to connect to a database, rather than its actual purpose of allowing a user to connect to a database and then create objects, database links to remote databases, alter sessions to set diagnostic events and so on. In 10gr2 CONNECT has one privilege and one only – CREATE SESSION.
I applaud this decision. Its brave, because it will break applications where required privileges haven’t been thought about, but it is the right thing to do.
I also like the enhancements to security for external procedures run as jobs, though rather than grant the new privilege CREATE EXTERNAL JOB to all users with the CREATE JOB privilege on upgrade I’d have preferred a report that stated something like
The following users have the ability to schedule execution of operating system scripts and commands. For security reasons this privilege has been removed by default in 10g Release 2. If a user requires this functionality please grant the new CREATE EXTERNAL JOB privilege to that account.