Swimming back to the surface

Wow, I haven't posted for over a month. (Slacker!) In my defense, during the last month we sold our home and purchased a new one, along with all the packing, paperwork, and headaches that go with it. Sooo glad to be done. :-)
So now I'm sitting in the Denver airport (one of my favorites) catching up on my reading.

I see Alexander Kornburst has found some holes in 11g. Yet another reason (in my humble opinion) to never install the first release of any product into a sensitive environment...or perhaps any environment other than a sandbox/playground.

Of course, I'm not the only one who moves cautiously in this arena. My good e-friend Peter Scott is just now getting his last customer onto 10g. I can relate to his junior DBA's desire to walk the upgrade by hand. Yes, it's more painful than running the assistant, but that pain can be a great teacher as to what an upgrade entails.

Speaking of Peter, he has another post about Snowflake-like schemas as they relate to the Product data domain. Pete and I have both blogged previously about the challenges of modeling product data. What's interesting here is Pete's convergence of challenges in governance and product modeling, and the potential application of "star-flake" modeling characteristics to meet the requirements. I need to give this some consideration...

On a "well, duh!" note, this story reports our data is less safe today than two years ago. I do believe companies are waking up and putting more effort into securing our data. Sadly, there's so many opportunities to blow it, so many new and naive online consumers, and so many crooks out there. It's going to take a while to get ahead of the curve on this one.

Microsoft's going to release an entity abstraction layer to "isolate the application from underlying logical database schemas." I'm guessing this is along the lines of concepts in data federation and/or 'information as a service' but I don't know enough to be sure. Anyone looked at the technical preview and want to comment?