RE: Would you recommend such an application for production use?

  • From: "Goulet, Richard" <Richard.Goulet@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <development@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "ORACLE-L" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:27:06 -0500

Brother does this list ever produce mountains of messages in  the blink
of an eye!!

OK, so while creating objects in the sys schema is not the most
brilliant thing to do it's not exactly totally unknown.  There are a
number of applications that I've come across that find it necessary to
do so.  Better to create a new schema, grant it appropriate privileges,
and then create the objects therein.  But that assumes some intelligence
on the database level by the vendor, something drastically missing in
most vendors.

Whether or not you use an application in production depends on a number
of items that vary with each vendor.  Many applications, especially
monitoring ones where creating sys objects is prevalent, attempt to
convince management that a trained DBA is no longer required.  These I
try to avoid/block at all costs, especially if the vendor is seriously
being pushy.


Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Lead
PAREXEL International

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Martin Bach
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 4:20 PM
To: ORACLE-L
Subject: Would you recommend such an application for production use?

Dear listers,

I tried to come up with a good name for this post but couldn't. So here
goes the story:

I have been asked to review a product that management is _very_ keen to
deploy in production. Unfortunately before this can happen it has to go
through a change management process which implies that "troublemakers"
like me can raise their concerns that need addressing. For a change I
have access to the source code of the application which makes it even
more interesting.

I discovered a number of things I don't like but was wondering what you
thought about these-maybe I'm just pedantic? Among the most terrifying
ones are:

- The installation script creates a user (default username = password)
and grants select privileges on the dictionary to the new application
user with grant option.

This is not too great but not too difficult to harden.

- the installation script furthermore creates objects in the sys schema,
namely create view foo as select * from someX$view

This is disturbing for me

- the owner of the application schema grants almost complete access on
its schema to public. The rationale is that the application needs to
allow a user logging into the database through the frontend access to
its schema

Now since the software is used for monitoring the health of a web
application through the tiers-including Oracle-anyone with connect
privileges could access these data...

Did anyone made a similar experience? What did you do?

Interested to hear comments!

Martin
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