Hiding the contents of procedures, functions, triggers, events, and views

You may want to distribute an application and a database without disclosing the logic contained within procedures, functions, triggers, events, and views. As an added security measure, 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.

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.

Debugging using the debugger will not show the procedure definition, nor will procedure profiling display the source.

Running one of the above statements on an object that is already hidden has no effect.

To hide the text for all objects of a particular type, you can use a loop similar to the following:

BEGIN
    FOR hide_lp as hide_cr cursor FOR
        SELECT proc_name, user_name
        FROM SYS.SYSPROCEDURE p, SYS.SYSUSER u
        WHERE p.creator = u.user_id
        AND p.creator NOT IN (0,1,3)
    DO
        MESSAGE 'altering ' || proc_name;
        EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'ALTER PROCEDURE "' ||
            user_name || '"."' || proc_name
            || '" SET HIDDEN'
    END FOR
END;

Hiding the contents of procedures, functions, triggers, events, and views

Note

See also