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Oracle Database 11g Beta: An Inside Look with IOUG President
Ari Kaplan

In this two-part series, Database Insider speaks with Ari Kaplan, longtime DBA and current president of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), to see what his members are saying about their Oracle Database 11g Beta experience.

This is part two of a series. Read part one.

Insider:	Do you have any personal favorite items you're looking out for in Oracle Database 11g Beta?
Kaplan:	My personal favorites are the plans to improve integration of Oracle Audit Vault and Oracle Database Vault. These options set Oracle Database apart from other vendors: SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, and so on. I personally was a database administrator on many projects in the past. As a DBA you have access to almost every piece of information possible. I was able to see people's credit cards, passwords, health records—you name it. If you're smart enough, you can look up anything, you can modify anything, and you can cover your tracks. But with Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Audit Vault and Oracle Database Vault, not even the DBA will be able to cover their own tracks. It puts everything in, so to speak, a locked vault, where only somebody like the COO or the CFO or an external audit company can go in and look and modify the records. That is incredible. Nobody else has that on the market. And if I were a CIO of a company, that alone would be reason to move to Oracle Database 11g.
Insider:	Describe the relationship between IOUG and Oracle. What part does IOUG play in the Oracle Database 11g Beta program?
Kaplan:	It's a very positive two-way relationship. We're one of the leaders in coordinating user membership as part of the Oracle Database 11g Beta program. Members of our board of directors themselves are active in the beta program. It's an example of how we help Oracle with their enhancement process. Outside of the beta process we work with our community to prioritize the functionality we would like to see Oracle build. So when Oracle spends the time and energy and money to build something, they know people will appreciate it. And whether it's Oracle, whether it's Microsoft or any vendor, when the vendor says that their solution is the most secure or the most scalable or provides the best performance, that's one thing. But when a member of an independent user group stands up and says, "I've installed Oracle RAC. It only took me a few days and now, I'm up and running," the general community tends to listen a lot more closely.
Insider:	What do IOUG members get out of the deal?
Kaplan:	From the end-user perspective, they get advocacy into Oracle. If you think about it, if you're an end-user and you do not belong to a user group, it's just you as a single voice against the large corporation. Your voice will probably get lost. But if you work in a larger user group, then your voice is really amplified, so you have a much stronger voice and advocacy into Oracle.
Insider:	Thank you for speaking with us.
Kaplan:	Thank you.

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