Oracle Database Vault is the only way to prevent a DBA from being able to access data stored in the database. That is an extra cost product, however, and it requires you to have an additional set of security admins whose job it is to grant the DBAs whatever privileges they actually need.
Barring that, you'd be looking at solutions that encrypt and decrypt the data in the application outside the database. That would involve making changes to the database structure (i.e. the salary
column would be declared as a raw
rather than a number
). And it involves application changes to call the encryption and decryption routines. And that requires that you solve the key management problem which is generally where these sorts of solutions fail. Storing the encryption key somewhere that the application can retrieve it but somewhere that no admin can access is generally non-trivial. And then you need to ensure that the key is backed up and restored separately since the encrypted data in the database is useless without the key.
Most of the time, though, I'd tend to suggest that the right approach is to allow the DBA to see the data and audit the queries they run instead. If you see that one particular DBA is running queries for fun rather than occasionally looking at bits of data in the course of doing her job, you can take action at that point. Knowing that their queries are being audited is generally enough to keep the DBA from accessing data that she doesn't really need.