Database

Database

The overall objective of a Database is to help an organization to achieve its goals. A Database can contribute to organizational success in different ways, including the ability to provide managers and decision makers with timely, accurate, and relevant information base on data (Stair & Reynolds, 2006). Databases also help companies generate information to reduce costs, increase profits, track past business activities, and open new marketing opportunities, like in my organization. Also Database helps the company allowing us to produce payroll, and to analyze the impact of raises, employee insurance benefits, and retirement contributions on long-term cost to our company.

A huge amount of data is entered into the computers of the company everyday, which is why we need the help of a suitable Database Management System, so the data could be use in a productive and satisfactory way for us. The Database Management System chosen by my organization is Oracle Database 11g.

Oracle Database 11g is a relational model and multi users DMBS (Database Management Systems). This powerful and expensive system allow dozen or hundreds of employees to access the same database system at the same time (EFYtimes, 2007). Database 11g offers nearly 500 features covering a wide range of areas, including manageability, high availability, scalability, infrastructure, content management, and business intelligence (Brunelli, 2007). Database high availability is very important in our company, because the company needs to be online at all times, in other words it needs to be online everyday, every week, every month, every year; if data becomes unavailable for any reason, the entire business might be put at risk. Oracle high availability give us benefits like meet the highest quality of service expectations at the lowest cost, helping our organization maintain a reliable and scalable infrastructure, or protect from server failure, scaling our database across multiple servers and protecting from failure. Another benefit in this same area is Avoid planned downtime, where Oracle Database 11g minimizes planned downtime with online maintenance, rolling upgrades and hot patching features (Oracle, 2007).

In a different area like security, features like Oracle Database Vault helps protect against the insider threat and address regulatory compliance needs such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and PCI. Oracle Database Vault can prevent highly privileged users, including powerful application DBAs and others, from accessing sensitive applications and data in Oracle databases outside their authorized responsibilities (Oracle, 2007). Oracle Database Vault can protect existing applications quickly and easily and requires no changes to our applications; and futures like Oracle Audit Vault reduces the cost and complexity of compliance and the risk of insider threats by automating the collection and consolidation of audit data. Oracle Audit Vault provides a secure and highly scalable audit warehouse, enabling simplified reporting, analysis, and threat detection on audit data. In addition, database audit settings are centrally managed and monitored from within Audit Vault, reducing IT security cost. The organization is in a much better position to enforce