Thursday, June 28, 2012

Want to learn about DB2 security? New best practices paper

A new DB2 Best Practices paper has been published on developerWorks: DB2 best practices: A practical guide to restrictive databases. Did you know that instead of CREATE DATABASE foo you could also say CREATE DATABASE foo RESTRICTIVE? But what are the differences? The restrictive database has only very few privileges granted to the group PUBLIC and thereby starts off with increased security.

In the new paper the authors compare how the non-restrictive and restrictive databases differ in terms of privileges with a focus on common use cases and administrative groups. It helps to understand how to make use of restrictive databases. While in regular databases a typical problem to secure the database, in a restrictive database it means granting the needed privileges so users can "work".