Administrative roles

Adaptive Server Enterprise has a more elaborate set of administrative roles than SQL Anywhere. In Adaptive Server Enterprise there is a set of distinct roles, although more than one login account on an Adaptive Server Enterprise can be granted any role, and one account can possess more than one role.

Adaptive Server Enterprise roles

In Adaptive Server Enterprise distinct roles include:

  • System Administrator   Responsible for general administrative tasks unrelated to specific applications; can access any database object.

  • System Security Officer   Responsible for security-sensitive tasks in Adaptive Server Enterprise, but has no special permissions on database objects.

  • Database Owner   Has full permissions on objects inside the database he or she owns, can add users to a database and grant other users the permission to create objects and execute commands within the database.

  • Data definition statements   Permissions can be granted to users for specific data definition statements, such as CREATE TABLE or CREATE VIEW, enabling the user to create database objects.

  • Object owner   Each database object has an owner who may grant permissions to other users to access the object. The owner of an object automatically has all permissions on the object.

In SQL Anywhere, the following database-wide permissions have administrative roles:

  • The Database Administrator (DBA authority) has, like the Adaptive Server Enterprise database owner, full permissions on all objects inside the database (other than objects owned by SYS) and can grant other users the permission to create objects and execute commands within the database. The default database administrator is user DBA.

  • The RESOURCE authority allows a user to create any kind of object within a database. This is instead of the Adaptive Server Enterprise scheme of granting permissions on individual CREATE statements.

  • SQL Anywhere has object owners in the same way that Adaptive Server Enterprise does. The owner of an object automatically has all permissions on the object, including the right to grant permissions.

For seamless access to data held in both Adaptive Server Enterprise and SQL Anywhere, you should create user IDs with appropriate permissions in the database (RESOURCE in SQL Anywhere, or permission on individual CREATE statements in Adaptive Server Enterprise) and create objects from that user ID. If you use the same user ID in each environment, object names and qualifiers can be identical in the two databases, ensuring compatible access.

See also