Ownership Permissions Overview

Ownership of a database object carries with it permissions to carry out actions on that object. The creator of a database object becomes the owner of that object.

Ownership permissions are not assigned to users in the same way that other permissions in this chapter are assigned.

Owners

A user who creates a new object within the database is called the owner of that object, and automatically has permission to carry out any operation on that object. The owner of a table may modify the structure of that table, for instance, or may grant permissions to other database users to update the information within the table.

Note: The owner of a table can only load that table if he or she is DBA or the server was started with the -gl all switch on the command line or configuration file. Ownership and resource authority are not sufficient to use LOAD TABLE. In order to use the LOAD TABLE statement, you also need INSERT permission on the table.

The DBA has permission to modify any component within the database, and so could delete a table created by another user, for instance. The DBA has all the permissions regarding database objects that the owner of each object has.

The DBA is also able to create database objects for other users, and in this case the owner of an object is not the user ID that executed the CREATE statement. Despite this possibility, this chapter refers interchangeably to the owner and creator of database objects.