Data masking

In many organizations (I hope so), the DBAs have the obligation for a security and compliance purpose to mask (scramble) all sensible information that leaves the production environment; as an example, when refreshing or creating a QA/TEST or DEV environment. To help us to address those requirements, we could use the Enterprise Manager Data Masking Pack (Remember it is an extra pack, and consequently you need to pay extra to be able to use it. This pack allows you to make use of premade masking templates and executes the process for you.) or as a different approach, use the REMAP_DATA parameter available in Data Pump to help us with this requirement.

Note

The REMAP_DATA parameter was introduced within Oracle 11g!

Let's use the classic SSN (Social Security Number) example to illustrate how it works:

1. In the previous chapter, we created a table named EMPLOYEE with three records. We would use this table to run our data masking scenario shown as follows:

   SQL> SELECT * FROM test.employee...