Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I was searching on google for something the other day and by accident I came across a paper by Jonathan Lewis about row level security. I had not seen this paper before so i saved it in an open window to look at later. I have just had time to read it now. The paper is titled " http://www.dbazine.com/jlewis15.shtml - (broken link) Row Level Security – Part 1 and you might expect from Jonathan is very well written. I am not sure when it was written but judging by the mention of 9.2.0.3 in the first paragraph it was a while ago. It is still quite relevant though.

The paper is the first in a series. I will get the others and have a look in a day or so. I am a bit busy at present. This paper starts off with some history and some examples of how it used to be done with a table, a trigger and a view. This is an excellent example that talks about performance issues and the appearance of sys_context() and its displacement of userenv().

Jonathan then goes on to detail contexts and gives examples showing how the previous example can be improved. He talks about and explains contexts in detail. This is an excellent article. I will track down the other parts and get back to you on those soon as well.