Using Roles Wisely

Standard roles are very powerful. There are a few important things that can affect your design with respect to roles, privileges, and the subsequent assignments to users.

Too Many Roles

The ability to create and assign roles to other roles repeatedly, coupled with the ability to grant privileges to both users and roles in a redundant way, can make absolute security management confusing and difficult. An almost endless hierarchy of roles can be created. The confusion is not from Oracle for allowing roles to be granted to roles or redundant privileges, but rather from administrators' behavior in actually doing this.