Re: Bank Databases

From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:29:50 +0100
Message-ID: <CABe10sbxn5jzi2azdcgx17Fkg-NrEQ=7waKj80=GUDfKuQcrOg_at_mail.gmail.com>

Agreed, except that I'm not sure that we'll get many details (and those we do will likely be filtered to a greater or lesser extent, perhaps for example blaming an external vendor and omitting internal details). It would be nice and useful if, as an industry, we could agree to pool anonymously lessons learned from cases like this but its a pretty brave step for any company to take, especially a bank given that once confidence is generally lost in the ability of a bank to safeguard or process money then the bank is effectively dead.
On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Matthew Zito <matt_at_crackpotideas.com>wrote:

> Yes, though I doubt it's anything as simple as an "Oracle issue".
> From my experience watching large organizations deal with complex
> crises like this, typically it's a series of cascading failures - so
> perhaps an Oracle database was involved, but many separate pieces had
> to fail in order to get to this point.
>
> For example, I once saw a major global company's firmwide email system
> go down for over a day due to a cascading series of:
> - storage array failure
> - misconfigured hardware
> - engineer typo
> - misunderstood recovery architecture
>
> I'm trying to keep it vague intentionally, but if any one of those
> things hadn't happened, they would have had an hour downtime on their
> email instead of a 30 hour downtime. I suspect the natwest issue is
> similar, *though* I do expect that we'll get more info in the coming
> days/weeks, so maybe we can get some more details then.
>
> Matt
>
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Howard Latham <howard.latham_at_gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > So Nat west being unable to process transactions for 5 days due to a
> change
> > in backup software and fail over could well be an Oracle issue.
> >
> > --
> > Howard A. Latham
> >
> >
> >
>

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info


--
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Received on Mon Jun 25 2012 - 06:29:50 CDT