FWD » Core Development » Database

OE has features that allow customers to:

1. Define users at the database (the _user table). There is no group support nor is there any support for roles. This is very simplistic.
2. Configure those accounts with a password and permissions (e.g. CAN-READ, CAN-WRITE...). These permissions are not very sophisticated or granular.
3. Authenticate using the database users and their stored passwords.
4. Associate those database users with the 4GL session (e.g. CLIENT-PRINCIPAL or SET-USERID()).
5. Enforce the permissions on database access.

Many customers use the authentication part but most do not use the permissions. We have some support for the authentication, though not with database level users. To the degree that customers require the RDBMS to honor this, we would need a different approach. It is not too hard to imagine that we could map the fairly simple OE user concept and the OE bare-bones permissions concept into modern database features.

If we were to do so, we would need to modify our database connection processing and management to match this approach. We would also need to integrate this into our OE compatible security support.