READ privilege

Read privilege is a new feature in Oracle Database 12.1.0.2. As SELECT privilege already exists, is READ privilege just a duplicate / redundant? In this blog post is shown that READ privilege is actually more restrictive that SELECT privilege. To do that let’s see the following example:

As seltest user execute the following SQL statements:

You can see that although seltest user has only SELECT privilege, he or she can lock table in exclusive mode and do select for update. Let’s see what happens if user only has READ object privilege (instead of SELECT):

Try to execute as readtest user the same SQL statements that seltest user executed and observe the results:

The results show READ privilege is more restrictive that SELECT privilege. You should grant READ privilege to a user in situations when you want to enable the user only to read data.