Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I was checking up on Howard's site today and came across an excellent new article about Virtual private databases. The article can be found here. This is a very well written paper that starts by showing us how the problem of segregating data from being viewed by particular users can be done badly with views. Howard then goes on to tell us why even doing it this way would be a big mistake. He then introduces us to Row Level Security or Virtual Private Databases (VPD) and shows how this Oracle functionality implemented in the server itself can be used to control access to each row of data depending on who is doing the accessing. Howard also goes on to talk about performance issues and application contexts as well as promising to write an advanced VPD article soon. The paper can be found here.