Once of the features I mentioned in a previous entry was the ability for Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 to automatically propogate the end user to the database connection. This bears more explanation.

In the past releases of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework, all database connections are pooled and shared within a channel of access. So for example, the online connections on the Business Application Server share a common pool of connections and the batch in a thread pool shares a seperate pool of connections.

The connections are pooled for performance reasons (the most expensive part of a typical transaction is opening and closing connections so we save time by having them ready beforehand). The idea is that when a business function needs some SQL to be execute it takes a spare connection from the pool, executes the SQL and then returns the connection back to the pool for reuse.

Unfortunelty to support the pool being started and ready before the transactions arrives means that you need to have a shared userid (as you dont know the users who need them beforehand). Therefore each connection uses the same database user to execute the SQL it needs. This is acceptable for executing transactions, generally but does not allow the DBA or other tools to ascertain which end user is actually running the transaction.

In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4, we now set the CLIENT_IDENTIFIER to the end userid (not the Login Id) when the connection is taken from the pool and used and reset it back to blank when returned to the pool. The CLIENT_IDENTIFIER is a feature that is present in the Oracle Database connection information.

From a monitoring perspective, when a connection to the database is actively running SQL, the end user is now able to be determined by querying the CLIENT_IDENTIFIER on the session object within the database. This can be done in the DBA's favorite monitoring tool (even just some SQL on the v$session table is enough).

This has other implications as well. Oracle sells a lot of other security addons to the database and so do third parties. If a site wants to have additional levels of security or auditing in the database then the CLIENT_IDENTIFIER, if supported, is now available to be recorded or used by those products to provide additional levels of security.

This facility was one of the highly "nice to haves" that customers would ask us about so we now allow it to be used to allow finer grained monitoring and additional security facilities.

Note: This facility is only available for customers using the Oracle Database versions of our products.