Ownership issues, would Trusted Oracle help?

Hello all,
We are migrating to Oracle on UNIX from our beautiful mainframe based Codasyl DBMS, and we have huge conceptual problems, to us they seem almost unsurmountable. I would be interested to know how these issues are being addressed out there in the big Oracle world. (We fear that these issues are what is keeping thousands of consultants programming happily away...) Specifically, we are developing a "PhD database" for all universities and colleges in the country. It is a small country, a total number of 240 PhD candidates yearly, small schools with no Oracle DBAs, and I really feel this should be a central database, not 40 minuscule ones. We also have a document archival system being developed for us by a consultancy firm. I have had to install 11 Oracle instances to accommodate this application. In both cases the problem is ownership: How can we implement that a department or an institution owns its own set of data, and its representatives can access that data, whereas nobody else can? We could have a "data owner" for each administrative entity, but we want the data structures and the accessing programs to be identical. You can only have one set of public synonyms for identically named objects. Otherwise accessed objects need to be prefixed with the schema name. This can not be parametrized. OR we could use views, and have an extra column in each table, but again each administrative entity would have to have its own set of views. This is a lot of overhead. The frontend tool is Powerbuilder, which doesn't exactly improve the functionality...
We have a feeling Trusted Oracle might solve the problem for us, but that is probably a huge overkill. We are not really paranoid about security for these applications, we are just wondering if it would provide some functionality. But I have heard that there is no point in running Trusted Oracle unless you run a secure OS, and that the secure versions of UNIX are late, feature-poor and buggy. Also I think there might be a delay in implementation of Oracle features?

I would be grateful for any thoughts, advice or examples of successful (and simple and elegant and maintainable...) workarounds!

Regards, Torfrid

torfrid.leek_at_usit.uio.no Received on Tue Nov 28 1995 - 00:00:00 CET