Problem with Roles and Triggers

Question

I'm having a strange problem with Roles and Triggers in Oracle. It's a little difficult to describe, so bear with me...
I'm trying to create a trigger that inserts records into a table belonging to a different user/owner. Of course, the owner of this trigger needs rights to insert records into this other table. I find that if I add these rights directly to the owner of the trigger, everything works okay and the trigger compiles successfully.
However, if I first create a Role and grant the "insert" rights to it, and then assign this role to the owner of the trigger, the trigger does not compile successfully.
To illustrate this, here's an example script. I'm using Oracle 10g Release 2...
-- Clean up...
DROP TABLE TestUser.TrigTable;
DROP TABLE TestUser2.TestTable;
DROP ROLE TestRole;
DROP TRIGGER TestUser.TestTrigger;
DROP USER TestUser CASCADE;
DROP USER TestUser2 CASCADE;
-- Create Users...
CREATE USER TestUser IDENTIFIED BY password DEFAULT TABLESPACE "USERS" TEMPORARY TABLESPACE "TEMP" QUOTA UNLIMITED ON "USERS";
CREATE USER TestUser2 IDENTIFIED BY password DEFAULT TABLESPACE "USERS" TEMPORARY TABLESPACE "TEMP" QUOTA UNLIMITED ON "USERS";
CREATE TABLE TestUser.TrigTable (TestColumn VARCHAR2(40));
CREATE TABLE TestUser2.TestTable (TestColumn VARCHAR2(40));
-- Grant Insert rights on TestTable to TestRole...
CREATE ROLE TestRole NOT IDENTIFIED;
GRANT INSERT ON TestUser2.TestTable TO TestRole;
-- Add TestRole to TestUser. TestUser should now have rights to INSERT on TestTable
GRANT TestRole TO TestUser;
ALTER USER TestUser DEFAULT ROLE ALL;
-- Now, create the trigger. This compiles unsuccessfully...
CREATE TRIGGER TestUser.TestTrigger AFTER INSERT ON TestUser.TrigTable
BEGIN
INSERT INTO TestUser2.TestTable (TestColumn) VALUES ('Test');
END;
When I do a "SHOW ERRORS;" after this, I get:
SQL> show errors;
Errors for TRIGGER TESTUSER.TESTTRIGGER:
LINE/COL ERROR
2/3 PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
2/25 PL/SQL: ORA-00942: table or view does not exist
SQL>
As I said above, if I just add the Insert rights directly to TestUser, the trigger compiles perfectly. Does anyone know why this is happening?
Thanks!
Adrian

Answer 1

Hi Raghu,
If the insert rights exist only on TestRole, and TestRole is assigned to TestUser, I can do the INSERT statement you suggest with no problems if I just execute it from SQLPlus (logged in as TestUser).
The question is, why does the same INSERT fail when it's inside the trigger?