Proper management of user IDs and permissions is essential in a data warehouse. It allows users to carry out their jobs effectively, while maintaining the security and privacy of appropriate information within the database.
You use SQL statements for assigning user IDs to new users of a database, granting and revoking permissions for database users, and finding out the current permissions of users.
Database permissions are assigned to user IDs. Throughout this chapter, the term user is used as a synonym for user ID. You should remember, however, that permissions are granted and revoked for each user ID.
Even if there are no security concerns regarding a multiuser database, there are good reasons for setting up an individual user ID for each user. The administrative overhead for individual user IDs is very low if a group with the appropriate permissions is set up. Groups of users are discussed later in this chapter.
Among the reasons for using individual user IDs are the following:
The network server screen and the listing of connections in Sybase Central are both much more useful with individual user IDs, as you can tell which connections are which users.
The backup log identifies the user ID that created the backup.
The message log displays the user ID for each database connection. For details, see “Message logging”.
