Question

Mask/Sanitize Development database

  • 24 May 2023
  • 1 reply
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Userlevel 7
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We’re working through a Cloud upgrade with a remote deployment. I’m running into a lot of performance issues, and I’d like to explore using different antimalware solutions, different public clouds, and different on-prem hardware. Whenever I copy our production database somewhere, though, it creates a significant business risk, so I need a full-sized copy of our system that has been made safe enough to use for this exploratory purpose.

 

I need to mask or sanitize our entire database to reduce or eliminate the risk of our business data getting compromised.

 

Question 1: Has anyone scrubbed a database like this? How did you do it?

 

There’s a pack available for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition called the Data Masking and Subsetting Pack. I saw that it needs to be licensed for the source database, or in this case our PROD 9 database.

 

Question 2: Does this pack need to be licensed for every user or just the IT users who are working in the sanitized environment?

 

Even if I can manage to mask all the fields myself, I’d have to mask both sides of each referential integrity constraint. This isn’t so bad for well-behaved fields that are just keys, but the system includes several columns like KEY_REF and KEY_VALUE that would need to be remapped as well.

 

Question 3: If you’ve done this before, how did you mask partial column values? If you’ve used the Oracle pack to do this, did it cover partial keys?


1 reply

Userlevel 7
Badge +18

Our system has over 100K columns and 6K tables, and the Oracle EE pack would require a prohibitive amount of data entry into Enterprise Manager.
 

 

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