Summary

Fine-grained access control (FGAC) brings security to the insides of your data tables. The technology enabler for FGAC is application contexts.

Application context are an efficient and flexible mechanism for storing security related information. The Oracle Database provides many default attributes in the USERENV namespace. These attributes are automatically populated and generally provide useful information about the user’s environment—IP address, authentication method, and more. The Client Identifier is also part of the USERENV namespace. This attribute can be set by a user or application and has the added benefit of being recorded in the audit trails.