Virtual Identity Dialogue

This post is to help clear up something posted by James McGovern recently.

His question:
"wonder why Oracle employees such as Tom Kyte, Mary Ann Davidson, Roger Sullivan, Amit Zavery or Mark Wilcox hasn't chimed in on when Oracle will support direct authentication against Active Directory without requiring an additional product?"

First - let me say - I'm sorry I haven't responded sooner. Frankly - I didn't know this thread was out there. Since I normally don't get trackbacks to this blog and people who want a response leave a comment - I had been ignoring reading my own Technorati watchlist. I'll try to do a better job of watching it from now on.

Second - we already support "direct authentication against Active Directory" without requiring an additional product. I'll elaborate in another post but suffice to say - the database supports both Kerberos and RADIUS. You can use either one to authenticate to the database using your AD credentials without any other product (though both to the best of my knowledge (check with your account rep) require an Advanced Security Option license for your database).

If you had attended OOW 2007 and came to the "Database integration with Active Directory & Windows Security" you would have seen this in action.