In this short paper I want to explore the rather interesting row level security feature added to Oracle 8i and above, starting with version 8.1.5. This functionality has been described as fine grained access control or row level security or virtual . . .
In this short paper I want to explore the rather interesting row level security feature added to Oracle 8i and above, starting with version 8.1.5. This functionality has been described as fine grained access control or row level security or virtual private databases but they all essentially mean the same thing. We will come back to this shortly but before we do that lets get to what this paper is about. This paper is meant as an overview; a taster in fact of what row level security can be used for and how it can be used, with some simple examples to illustrate. I want to also discuss some of the issues with row level security. Finally, I also want to show how to view what row level security components have been implemented in the database and also touch on how to view how the actual database queries are altered by the row level security functionality in the oracle optimizer.

The example program code used in this paper is available at http://www.petefinnigan.com/sql.htm

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