Portal Login and DB security

Question

If a user logs in via portal, how is this (if at all) synched up with DB security? Will there be/can there be a way this is tied together so that if a user has security on row level of DB, this is known to Portal at login in time.

Answer 1

Stella,
I think the Portal itself doesn't care if you have DB access or not. A user mapped to a db user gets more(or less) privileges and can create reports and stuff(if create priv. is given).If you are a db user and a Portal user, Portal will also login to the database, when you login to the Portal. Simple test:select v$session before logging in, and then after. you will see the difference.
If you want data access of Portal users to be governed by row-level security, there are
2 methods:
1. Create every Portal user as a DB user.
The pros of this method are that if you implement VPD, the RDBMS will apply row-level
security when the user logs in and accesses data. The problem is that you have two create two users using 2 separate UIs. We have to implement this solution for our Client and the # of users are in thousands. We are writing a custom portlet for this.
2. There is a white paper which descibes using VPD for Portal-only users. It is fairly
simple, but we haven't done a full test.
hth,
Sanjay