User Security Question

Database version: 9.2.0.6.0
OS = Solaris 8

I currently work for an organisation that continually shoots itself in the foot with the large amount of unauthorised changes it makes to the production database of the main business application. These changes are being made by a motley bunch of devlopers, support analysts ... pretty much anyone who feels like it really.

To make matters worse they are doing this using the main schema account (please excuse me if I mangle terminology, I'm not a DBA) used by the application itself, thus leaving no audit trail of who has made these changes. All show as being the application that has made the change, rather than some nut with Toad and a cavalier attitude as is more often the case. Worse; tracing (?) is not turned on so that info is even more limited than it could be.

I am aware of how bad this is m'kay (on any number of levels) but until I can persuade/force the organisation to plough resource into what is quite a large undertaking, simply changing the password is an appealing but not viable option.

As an interim measure I am resigning myself to attempting to force people not to use this account using policy and a mixture of begging and loud tutting, however I'd be interested to see if anyone out there has any clever suggestions as to how I could stop people using the application user account without making changes to the account or incurring any DB downtime. I did wonder if it was possible to allow connections by this user from only a list of trusted sources but our DBA thinks this isn't possible. Received on Fri Nov 02 2007 - 12:32:28 CDT