Oracle in a Nutshell

Views and Stored Procedures

In addition to the security features described in previous sections are other ways to provide security for data in your Oracle database. Until Oracle8i, the most common approaches to limiting access to data based on the value of the data were through the use of views or stored procedures:

Views

With views, you define a subset of data in a table and then grant access to the view only to a user. Starting with Oracle8i, you can achieve the same security by selection with the use of fine-grained access control, described in the next section.

Stored procedures

You can impose a similar limitation by accessing a table only through a stored procedure or package and then granting access to the stored procedure or package to users. The stored procedure could have its own validation rules within its code.

We’ll look at some additional access controls in the following sections.