Hiding the contents of a procedure, function, trigger, event, or view

To distribute an application and a database without disclosing the logic contained within procedures, functions, triggers, events, and views, you can obscure the contents of these objects using the SET HIDDEN clause of the ALTER PROCEDURE, ALTER FUNCTION, ALTER TRIGGER, ALTER EVENT and ALTER VIEW statements.

Prerequisites

You must be the owner of the object, have the ALTER ANY OBJECT system privilege, or have one of the following privileges:

Procedures and functions – ALTER ANY PROCEDURE system privilege

Views – ALTER ANY VIEW system privilege

Events – MANAGE ANY EVENT system privilege

Triggers –

ALTER ANY TRIGGER system privilege
ALTER privilege on the underlying table and the CREATE ANY OBJECT system privilege
For triggers on views, you must have the ALTER ANY TRIGGER and ALTER ANY VIEW system privileges

Task

The SET HIDDEN clause obfuscates the contents of the associated objects and makes them unreadable, while still allowing the objects to be used. You can also unload and reload the objects into another database.

The modification is irreversible, and deletes the original text of the object. Preserving the original source for the object outside the database is required.

Note: Setting the preserve_source_format database option to On causes the database server to save the formated source from CREATE and ALTER statements on procedures, views, triggers, and events, and put it in the appropriate system view's source column. In this case both the object definition and the source definition are hidden.

However, setting the preserve_source_format database option to On does not prevent the SET HIDDEN clause from deleting the original source definition of the object.

Use the appropriate ALTER statement with the SET HIDDEN clause.

Option	Action
Hide an individual object	Execute the appropriate ALTER statement with the SET HIDDEN clause to hide a single procedure, function, trigger, event, or view.
Hide all objects of a specific type	Execute the appropriate ALTER statement with the SET HIDDEN clause in a loop to hide all procedures, functions, triggers, events, or views.

An automatic commit is executed. The object definition is no longer visible. The object can still be directly referenced, and is still eligible for use during query processing.