Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I saw a great article on the Amis blog a few days ago and made a note to have a look and talk about it here. The article is written by Lucas Jellema and is titled "Standard for Database Development - Getting rid of USER from PL/SQL and SQL - no longer is USER equivalent to End User". This is a great article that talks about the need to get rid of the USER pseudo function from older code written in the days when all database users had their own database account and using the function did return the correct user. This was in the days before proxy users and connection pooling. Lucas starts with the reasons USER was used and the implications of using it now and why it should be removed and the fact that he is saying it shouldn’t be removed in all cases. Lucas goes on to show some examples of a home grown application user table and also a VPD example. He goes on to give examples of how the user might be set and the issues of application servers, middle tiers and logon triggers. Lucas also talks about the fact that the use of USER translates to a select from dual and how this has improved in 10g.

Great paper and well worth a read.