Information Modeling and Relational Databases, 2nd Edition

13.8. Security and Metadata

This section looks briefly at two topics that any database administrator needs to be familiar with: security and metadata in SQL. Let’s begin with security. A database is secureif and only if operations on it can be performed only by users authorized to do so. Each system user is assigned a user identifier (AuthID). The user who “owns” or creates a database has all access privileges on it and can grant and revoke access privileges on it to other users. SQL provides a grant statementfor granting various kinds of privileges to users. The SQL-92 syntax is:

grant all privileges |
select linsert[(col)] | update [ (col) ] | delete | usage | references [ ( col) ] [ .... ]
on object
   to user-list[ with grant option ]

where ...