Virtual Private Database (VPD)
What is VPD? Virtual Private Database (VPD) is a database security feature that is built into an Oracle database server, as opposed to being part of an application that is accessing the data. The user is only allowed to see the data they have been given permission to see. VPD is a feature of Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, was introduced in Oracle8i. Why VPD? VPD is used when the standard object privileges and associated database roles are insufficient to meet application security requirements. VPD policies can be simple or complex depending on organization’s security requirements. VPD uses application contexts to provide row-level security and fine-grained access control based on a company's security policies. Application contexts are simply key value pairs that are created in a defined namespace. A simple VPD example might restrict access to data during business hours and a more complex VPD example might read an application context during a login trigger and ...