sysdba privileges and shutdown

coming from an oracle7 background and having received some oracle 8i training I have been warned about the evils of connect internal.

While looking into sysdba and sysoper I have come across what seems to be some confusion. Sybrand in 1999 mentioned in this forum that sysdba was a role and then in 2002 an older and wiser sybrand says it's a privilege - and this latter opinion seems to be the concensus. However looking in the dictionary views such as dba_sys_privs i cannot find any mention of the sysdba priviledge. i can see a DBA role but this comes with its own warnings because the default role can (should) be tweaked for the production environment.

Other reading suggests that these are just keywords and not privileges in the traditional sense although if that is the case how can they be granted to other users?

The documentation talks about the extra functionality allowed to priviledged users but not what the exact system priviliges are (in particular I am trying to work out who exactly has rights to shutdown the database)

In short:
a) could someone please clear up *exactly* what sysdba is and where its associated priviliges can be found in the dictionary views b) how the sqlplus shutdown command works - is it an alter database command - is it a script?

i am also wondering why the unix group of dba is allowed sysdba rights as a matter of course - is this not a bit of a security risk?

thanking you in advance,
Rachel Received on Fri Mar 07 2003 - 10:41:27 CST