Does Oracle provide a package or function for data masking ? For example, in a development environment, for data protection purposes, the information of the table customer needs to be masked. create table customer (last_name varchar2(25), first_name varchar2(25), address varchar2(25));insert into customer values('Doe', 'John', '10 someroad st'); In the production environment, if we do a select on customer, the result would be without any surprise: select *from customer;LAST_NAME FIRST_NAME ADDRESS-------------- -------------- --------------------Doe John 10 someroad stIn the development environment, the same information needs to be masked for something like:LAST_NAME FIRST_NAME ADDRESS-------------- -------------- --------------------Ahd Uiea 55 xxxx ueIt doesn't really need to make sense, it doesn't need to be readable. Just needs to be masked. Does Oracle supply anything for that purpose at all ? I tried to find but didn't have much success. I found a third party software that will do the job. If you want to, I can post its name here. Thanks Tom and happy 2006.Gleisson Henrique more »

Is "release early, release often" enough?The issue there is, if you just follow the release early, release often mantra, you find yourself running around in circles, because you ship code, you get some feedback from people, you do a focus group.Customers say,?Give me feature X,? ?Give me feature Y,? and sometimes you do what they want, maybe sometimes you?re going to do what you want, and then they get mad at you. Pretty soon you?re chasing your own tail a little bit because you?re not operating against a clear, long-term vision of what you?re trying to accomplish. more »

Items against Agile The best ideas aren't built by consensus Apple doesn't ask customers what they want You're misinterpreting the 80/20 rule Mock-ups are faster than code iterations, without some of the drawbacks Releasing too early can ruin your reputation Ignoring architecture creates waste Untrue: "The worst thing you can do is built an unnecessary feature." Customers are notoriously bad at providing feedbackIn the end, of course it's better to have more feedback than less, better to be more agile than less, and better to have technical debt with a successful product than a failed product. However, it's just not fair to present only one side of the argument! more »