Hey all, I was looking to get some input from anyone who may have been in our shoes before, and am curious on how they resolved this business requirement.

We have a number of Oracle database instances running. We are running Oracle 12c SE2. A new requirement has come forward and we need to isolate and encrypt all PII information in the different instances. Standard Edition does not have any of the security features that Enterprise has. And, the cost of purchasing and running Enterprise on the existing machine due to the number of cores is not something the company is in a position to do.

The ideal situation is to have the PII isolated, and no other instance can query the PII data over any DB Link. Currently we have PII data scattered in different tables, in different schemas, and queries that join PII & non PII tables.

So, our thought was to move this PII data to another database instance, perhaps a smaller machine running Enterprise with a minimal number of cores, or maybe set up a Postgres DB and have all the PII data kept there. Procedures & queries would have to be changed / moved from the current location to the PII instance, and queries that require PII data would have to be initiated from there. In either case, it will mean a lot of changes to stored procedures, as well as to the application. This will affect application performance, customer experiences, etc.

We're sure that we are not the first company to be in this position, and while Oracle wants to sell us licenses to Enterprise (of course), we are wondering what others have done to overcome this.

Many thanks for any useful input.