Oracle DBAs are responsible and accountable for many different areas of the database that they maintain. These areas include availability, recoverability, performance monitoring, accessibility and security.

One principal aspect of security is controlling user access to the database, which can be broken down into three major components.

• there must be a method for identifying the users
• there must be methods for limiting access to objects and activities within the database for the users
• the ability to audit user activities is a common requirement.

One method of identifying users would be to create specific user accounts in the database for each and every end user on the system. The DBA would then determine which activities the end user needs to be able to perform and (usually via roles) grant them the appropriate privileges to do those specific tasks.

However, in many cases with Oracle databases and associated applications the true end user is captured by the middle tier application, which then connects to the database and acts on behalf of the end user. In this case, the middle tier is authenticating the user rather than the actual database itself and the middle tier needs to be able to invoke roles and the specific privileges needed to act on behalf of the end user. This essentially is what proxy authentication is all about.

Read the full article on Database Journal:
Using Proxy Authentication Methods in Oracle Database 11g

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