Understanding the fundamentals of database security

The purpose of a database is to store data. That data can come in many forms, but if someone takes the time and money to hire DBAs to organize and store it, that data is important in some way. As a DBA, it is easy to focus on the practicalities of administration, such as performance tuning, backup and recovery, or database and object creation. In the day-to-day life of a DBA, which often consists of "fighting fires", it is easy to lose sight of security. The security of the data is not a subject about which someone will complain to a DBA—until that data has been compromised. Security is a responsibility that a DBA must often bear alone. Compound this with the fact that so few people really understand what's involved in securing a database. This leaves us with an extremely important facet of administering a database that is often neither understood nor valued by those outside of the database administration team. Nevertheless, that responsibility...