New downloads from Oracle

Oracle has some new downloads available on their website. Newly available are:
- Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite 10g (10.1.3.4)
- Oracle Database Vault 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.4.0) for Linux x86-64
- Oracle Instant Client for Mac OS X (v10.2.0.4 Intel x86)

Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite 10g (10.1.3.4)
As the marketing text from Oracle tells you: “Oracle Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite speeds process innovation by rapidly modeling business processes and converting them into IT executables. Oracle BPA Suite, based on the market leading IDS Scheer ARIS Design Platform, delivers a comprehensive set of integrated products that allows business users to design, model, simulate, and optimize business processes to achieve maximum operational efficiency. Now you can narrow your company's "strategy to execution" gap with Oracle BPA Suite.”

So meaning, it is a tool do your business process analysis and development based upon the ARIS design. ARIS is to complex and to vast to start explaining it in this post, however a good starting point is for example this PDF file from SAP or you can for example take a look here for another high level overview.

Oracle Database Vault 10g Release 2
Already for some time the release 2 version of Oracle Database Vault 10g was available for download however not fro Linux x86-64. Oracle Database Vault helps you protect your data within the database for people who have all the access to your systems. For example take a DBA who in principle will have access to all data within the database as part of his daily job. Now business compliancy programs like SOX will require that you protect some data even from those users like a DBA. The Database Vault will help you comply with for example SOX.

However, this can also be used for other purposes, let’s say you have to store very sensitive data in your oracle database like military grade information or medical patient records. You want this information available only to users who have access rights to it by their business role and not give access to it to people by their technical role they play in your IT department. Also in those cases you can use the Database Vault to make sure nobody can read data they are not supposed to be.

Oracle Instant Client for Mac OS X
Running Oracle software on your Mac. For times it was a big wish of myself to be able to run all Oracle products on a Mac, now we see that more and more software comes to the market which is capable of running on the Mac. We already had the developer tools on a mac and even the database and numerous other things from Oracle and now we have the Oracle Instant Client for Mac OS X (v10.2.0.4 Intel x86) available to download from the oracle website.

“Instant Client allows you to run your applications without installing the standard Oracle client or having an ORACLE_HOME. OCI, OCCI, Pro*C, ODBC, and JDBC applications work without modification, while using significantly less disk space than before. Even SQL*Plus can be used with Instant Client. No recompile, no hassle.”