Using Advanced Security And OID To Create A Database SSO Environment

Mark Rittman -

"I am in the process of implementing oid and security in datawarehosuing environemnt very similar to whatever i have read in ur fantastic paper. i have asked and queried a few oracle gururs who come up with answers that everything is possible with oid w/o really understanding the shortfalls in the product. ur paper was very helpful and i though i could ask you a few clarifications on this.

  • this is the scenario i am dealing with now. we have a few databases with a big set of user comunity. i would like to store the userids and passwords for all these users in a single oid instance so that it gives a single-sign on effect when users access these databases. so when they have access to tools like sqlplus can this be achieved?
  • and i understand that u can have the 9i database use the oid to store userid and password and u talk about syncing up the userids and passwords. here is my question
  • i have database A,database B having a common user C. when C is created in database A can his password and privileges be linked to database B too. that is the syncing you are talking about is it two-way from database to oid and oid to database too.

can you please tell me whether you have any other documentation on setting up oid and the usual gotchas that one has to keep in mind when testing them."

It looks like what you're looking for is the 'Advanced Security Option' for the Oracle 9i database. The "Oracle 9i Advanced Security Release 2 Factsheet" on OTN gives a good overview of this Oracle 9i option.

In particular, Advanced Security can be used to set up global users, roles and accounts that can be used across a set of Oracle Database applications, with full details of how these are set up given in the OTN document "Oracle Advanced Security 9i: Enterprise User Security"

Looking at what Advanced Security does, you wouldn't need to sync the OID to the database users and roles, as Advanced Security would do this for you. Also, you wouldn't need to sync individual OIDs with each other, as there's just one OID instance per enterprise. The only time you'd need to sync OID instances is if you want to synchronise the 9i Database OID with the 9iAS OID instance (or indeed sync either with the Oracle Apps 11i OID instance) to achieve single sign-on across the complete Oracle technology stack.

In terms of Gotchas - well, first of all, bear in mind that Advanced Security is a pay-extra option for the database. Also, be prepared to spend a bit of time getting it all set up. In addition, whilst setting up Advanced Security on your database is a fairly well-trodden path, synchronising it with 9iAS or Oracle Apps is a far more complex task (and with no clear 'best practice' in this area published by Oracle), although I've been told by Oracle support that this whole area is much simpler to set up with Oracle Application Server 10g. Haven't tried it myself though.

You can find out more details on Oracle Advanced Security on OTN's Advanced Security product page.