Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I got an email the other day from someone who asked me if I knew why account status's with key values of 3 and 7 were missing as indicated in the table SYS.USER_ASTATUS_MAP. The table is used to link the numeric status listed in SYS.USER$ to the text description for those status's. I will give the contents of the SYS.USER_ASTATUS_MAP table so you can see what I mean:

SQL> connect sys/change_on_install@sans as sysdba
Connected.
SQL> desc sys.user_astatus_map
Name Null? Type
----------------------------------------- -------- -----------------------
STATUS# NOT NULL NUMBER
STATUS NOT NULL VARCHAR2(32)

SQL> select *
2 from sys.user_astatus_map;

STATUS# STATUS
---------- --------------------------------
0 OPEN
1 EXPIRED
2 EXPIRED(GRACE)
4 LOCKED(TIMED)
8 LOCKED
5 EXPIRED & LOCKED(TIMED)
6 EXPIRED(GRACE) & LOCKED(TIMED)
9 EXPIRED & LOCKED
10 EXPIRED(GRACE) & LOCKED

9 rows selected.

SQL>

As you can see the status's of 3 and 7 are missing. The table is created and populated by the script $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/sql.bsq - The only other places the table is mentioned is in catalog.sql and migrate.bsq. From the order of insert statements in sql.bsq if new entries were added in order then a sort of binary sequence was started 0,1,2,4,8 (see the descriptions above), then 5,6,9 and 10 were added. But why were 3 and 7 not used, are there two other status's planned or used in the past? Do they have some internal meaning?

I was interested by the question but cannot answer it other than its probably not meaningful that status's 3 and 7 are missing. Doe anyone know? - let me know if you do.