ASA Database Administration Guide
  Managing User IDs and Permissions
    Using views and procedures for extra security

Using views for tailored security

Views are computed tables that contain a selection of rows and columns from base tables. Views are useful for security when it is appropriate to give a user access to just one portion of a table. The portion can be defined in terms of rows or in terms of columns. For example, you may wish to disallow a group of users from seeing the salary column of an employee table, or you may wish to limit a user to see only the rows of a table they have created.

Example 

The Sales manager needs access to information in the database concerning employees in the department. However, there is no reason for the manager to have access to information about employees in other departments.

This example describes how to create a user ID for the sales manager, create views that provides the information she needs, and grants the appropriate permissions to the sales manager user ID.

1. Create the new user ID using the GRANT statement. While logged in as a user ID with DBA authority, enter the following:

   CONNECT "DBA"
   IDENTIFIED by SQL ;
   
   GRANT CONNECT
   TO SalesManager
   IDENTIFIED BY sales

2. Define a view which only looks at sales employees as follows:

   CREATE VIEW emp_sales AS
     SELECT emp_id, emp_fname, emp_lname
     FROM "DBA".employee
     WHERE dept_id = 200

   The table should therefore be identified as DBA.employee, with the owner of the table explicitly identified, for the SalesManager user ID to be able to use the view. Otherwise, when SalesManager uses the view, the SELECT statement refers to a table that user ID does not recognize.

3. Give SalesManager permission to look at the view:

   GRANT SELECT
   ON emp_sales
   TO SalesManager

   You use exactly the same command to grant permission on views and on tables.

Example 2 

The next example creates a view which allows the Sales Manager to look at a summary of sales orders. This view requires information from more than one table for its definition:

1. Create the view.

   CREATE VIEW order_summary AS
     SELECT order_date, region, sales_rep, company_name
     FROM "DBA".sales_order
       KEY JOIN "DBA".customer

2. Grant permission for the Sales Manager to examine this view.

   GRANT SELECT
   ON order_summary
   TO SalesManager

3. To check that the process has worked properly, connect to the SalesManager user ID and look at the views you created:

   CONNECT SalesManager
   IDENTIFIED BY sales ;
   SELECT *
   FROM "DBA".emp_sales ;
   SELECT *
   FROM "DBA".order_summary ;

No permissions have been granted to the Sales Manager to look at the underlying tables. The following commands produce permission errors.

SELECT * FROM "DBA".employee ;
SELECT * FROM "DBA".sales_order

Other permissions on views 

The previous example shows how to use views to tailor SELECT permissions. You can grant INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE permissions on views in the same way.

For more information about allowing data modification on views, see Using views.