Re: Acessing data - security versus ease of use

On Tue, 02 Dec 2003 21:07:13 -0800, Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote:

>Snid wrote:
>
>> I was wondering how people allow clients to access the data from their
>> databases?
>>
>> All of our machines are locked down with firewall rules, so that only a few
>> people are allowed through the firewall; however, this prevents people
>> accessing the data with ODBC which means complex methods of replicating data
>> and allowing it to be accessed are used, ie dumping the data into another
>> database which is less secure.
>>
>> What sort of middle tier applications or gateways are people using?
>>
>> Are there any alternatives such as using some sort of ODBC connection over
>> https?
>>
>>
>It would be remarkably valuable to know a few things first:
>1. Verion and edition of Oracle.
>2. Hardware platform and operating system.
>3. What front-end tools are being used.
>
>But in general ... I never ... and I mean NEVER ... use ODBC to connect
>to a database. There are plenty of solutions. Knowing more about what
>you are doing would be a first step to making a recommendation.

Daniel,

I would be interested in some of the alternatives to ODBC. We have a growing base of people using MS-Access to develop their own reports against Oracle db's. We give them a common user-id that has read-only access, but I've never been comfortable with this, for a couple of reasons. First, I foresee the day when they will start demanding update capability. If that is granted, all data integrity goes out the window. Second, ODBC drivers seem particularly brittle -- very dependant on exact version, release, patch of both the OS (Windows) and the Oracle client. Received on Wed Dec 03 2003 - 08:35:43 CST