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Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

This is the weblog for Pete Finnigan. Pete works in the area of Oracle security and he specialises in auditing Oracle databases for security issues. This weblog is aimed squarely at those interested in the security of their Oracle databases.

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creating read only tables



I saw a good thread yesterday morning on comp.databases.oracle.server where the poster wanted to know if it is possible to create a read-only table. Some great ideas were suggested, from the basics of restricting privileges, triggers to capture the changes, DDL triggers even a great idea involving disable validate constraint. This stops DML from taking place. There was also a suggestion from Howard Rogers about using a read only tablespace and a read-only datafile. Some of the ideas involving triggers have issues as sqlldr can bypass the triggers. I suggested some ideas on grants and also to use Row Level Security. It seems from this very interesting thread that its almost impossible to make a table truly read only for a long period of time. It is possible to do it over shorter periods if users can be prevented from making silent changes to reverse the read-only status. This potential functionality could be a useful addition for Oracle to consider in the future, true read only tables.