Sun 17 Jun 2007
Hedgehog: New Database Security Solution
Posted by Slavik under Oracle, monitoring, security
[3] Comments
This is a personal as well as a commercial posting for me… Tomorrow is a special day in the short history of my company – after long months of R&D, we are finally releasing our product, named Hedgehog (there’s already some coverage in Dark Reading). These are very exciting times both for me personally and for the entire team at Sentrigo, who’ve made this possible through a lot of hard work and well applied knowledge – I feel very lucky to have such a great team working with me.
Hedgehog is database security monitoring software that monitors DB transactions in real-time, and generates alerts based on a highly flexible set of policy rules. A light-weight sensor is installed on the database machine and monitors the shared memory. It doesn’t use redo logs or DBMS APIs – those would be too slow… The trick is to do it so that it doesn’t use up CPU power.
Hedgehog can be downloaded from Sentrigo’s website, and while it supports only Oracle for the moment, in the coming months we will release versions for MS SQL, DB2 and other major DBMSs. There are basically two version – Hedgehog Standard, which is totally free to use, and Hedgehog Enterprise, which is not free but available for free evaluation. The differences are explained in some detail on the website, but basically it boils down to prevention capabilities and enterprise scalability and integration.
My sense is that we’re bringing something new to this space, and I’m anxious to see how this will be received. Feedback is of course welcome. Give it a try!

The Dark Reading article claims no additional load on the server because Hedgehog is running in hardware, they say.
Any fact behind that claim?
The hardware part was a misinterpretation on the Dark Reading side. The meaning was that Hedgehog is a software only product that uses OS APIs to access shared memory directly to do its monitoring. We do not use DBMS APIs because that would be too slow and costly CPU wise.
Could you please publish the technical documentation for Hedgehog at the Sentrigo website? (without registration) Thanks.