Category: 11gR1, 11gR2
December 22

APEX Lockdown: Securing the XDB Protocol Server

This is hopefully one of the first posts about how to secure, setup, a proper APEX environment seen from a DBA perspective. Because this website is mainly about XMLDB, it is also about the XDB protocol server and currently not about using Apache or the (apparently another way of doing things) new upcoming APEX Listener.

The behavior of the XDB Protocol Server is controlled by its xdbconfig.xml file. This xdbconfig.xml file is restricted to an XML Schema called xdbconfig.xsd. Both can be found in the XMLDB folders. The xdbconfig.xml can be found in the root folder. The xdbconfig.xsd file is part of Oracle XML Schemata and can be found in the /sys/schemas/PUBLIC/xmlns.oracle.com/xdb/ folder.

The xdbconfig.xml and xdbconfig.xsd files are, as all files and folders in XMLDB, secured/controlled via Access Control Lists, ACL files. The xdbconfig.xml file is controlled via the /sys/acls/all_owner_acl.xml ACL file. The xdbconfig.xsd file is controlled via the /sys/acls/bootstrap_acl.xml ACL file.

The security ACL settings for those files (resources as files and folders are called in XMLDB):

all_owner_acl.xml:

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December 4

UKOUG – Boost Your Environment with XMLDB

My presentation of 2nd of December during the UKOUG Conference… So what was in it? Mainly appetizers of how some useful things work and a little bit high level concepts. I demonstrated, I hope, new ways, with (some) foundations coming from XML DB functionality. How to interface with the outside world, for example, by directly saving and selecting from multiple XML files, on disk, from your database or getting or pushing data from/to the internet, like RSS data, getting data for your Google Maps API or easily setting up a SOAP web service.

Boost Your Environment With XMLDB

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: with environment)

So among others:

  • How to enable, disable the Protocol Server and to see its Status
  • Overview of the Protocol Server configuration file xdbconfig.xml, Its contents and meaning
  • Memory structures that effect the shared server and therefore also the Protocol Server
  • Protocol HTTP API’s like the PL/SQL Gateway, DBURI (oradb) and Native Database Web Services (orawsv)
  • An overview how the Native Database Web Services works + DEMO
  • An overview how the DBURI servlet works + DEMO
  • An overview of URITypes of  HTTPUriType and XDBUriType’s + DEMO’s
  • The possibilties of combining BFILENAME and XML, like selecting and save files directly from disk
  • An overview of Repository Event’s, how it works demonstrated via a simple DEMO
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October 18

OSDM: Not There Yet…(Reverse Engineering XMLTypes)

Driven by a post from Lewis about “OSDM: Rerverse Engineer A Schema“, I dared my luck to play with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler (OSDM), trying to see if it understands the XML database realm off doing things. It doesn’t understands it…at least, yet.  I used the early adopter release 1.5.1 (build 518).

I wonder if it is reasonable that I am disappointed; In the long run the “XDB” schema that I used to reverse engineer isn’t relational but (at least) object-relational. Most of the object relational issues, OSDM understands, but not the theory behind XMLType tables. I tried it multiple times, in the end, even the “secondary tables” and “spatial properties” option you can check during the reverse enginering option.

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