Oracle Security By William Heney, Marlene Theriault
Table of Contents
Chapter 3. Oracle Database Objects
3.10 Profiles
Oracle provides a way for you to control the allocation and use of resources in the database on a user-by- user basis. This mechanism is known as a profile . There are actually two different (and unrelated) types of profiles available in an Oracle database:
Product profiles
System resource profiles
Product profiles let you block access to specific commands or Oracle products. For several releases prior to Oracle7, you could control user access to almost any product by creating a record in the PRODUCT_USER_PROFILE table. For example, suppose that you did not want the user mary to be able to log on to SQL*Plus interactively. You would put an entry into the PRODUCT_USER_PROFILE table which indicated that mary was not to be granted access to SQL*Plus. In Oracle7, the PRODUCT_USER_PROFILE table was replaced with two tables: PRODUCT_PROFILE and USER_PROFILE.
Oracle 7 also introduced the concept of the system resource profile, which is used to limit the amount of database system resources available to each user; you limit resources by establishing a profile for each user. Oracle supplies a default profile for users who do not have custom profiles.
Chapter 6 , describes both product profiles and system resource profiles.
