Itinerary

Infosys

Internship · Mysore · Jan — May 2018

Five months of training on Python, DBMS, data structures and Oracle database administration, and then the part that stuck: a team project building infrastructure for a banking application, where only two requirements really mattered — the data must stay private, and the database must never be down.

  1. Redaction where it mattered

    Data redaction policies on the tables holding the most sensitive columns, so values were masked as they were read rather than trusted to whatever queried them.

  2. Encryption at rest

    Transparent Data Encryption across every tablespace, so the files on disk were not the weak point.

  1. Three kinds of standby

    Data Guard on the primary, with physical, logical and snapshot standby databases each on a separate server.

  2. Failover without a human

    A Data Guard broker configured for fast-start failover, so losing the primary did not depend on somebody being awake to notice.

A team of six, on Oracle 12c. It was the first time I saw that the interesting problems in software are usually the ones about what happens when it breaks.