This month's column explores two topics of great importance: database security and mission-critical databases. Database security has always been a topic to be taken seriously, but exposing your data to the Internet and its hacker subculture increases the threat level. Selecting the wrong DBMS software for managing mission-critical data also increases your exposure. However, awareness of external security threats seems to be much greater than concerns about using a database manager that could put mission-critical data at risk from those threats. The possibility of online analytical processing (OLAP) becoming as widespread as transaction processing (see the text box tided "Microsoft, OLAP, and the Web: An Insider's View") heightens concerns about data at risk, because OLAP programs use valuable, sensitive data.
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