Essay on The Relationship between Users and Roles in Databases

            It is important to understand that databases are accessed by some users, and everyone cannot access database of any kind, if he/she is not given permission or privilege to access that particular database. So, it means that database will be accessed by one or more than users, who are permitted to do so. It is important to see that what kind of users a database has. The first one is called superuser; it is the one, who has created the database, and he/she is the administrator of that database. All kind of operations and things related to database can be accessed as well as performed by the superuser. The superuser is also the one, who give permissions or revoke those permissions to other users. The second type of user is called object owner. This user gets the permission from the super user, and a database object can be created by the object owner (Shah, 2017)

Moreover, the third user of the database is everyone else including all object owners, and all other users who are not superusers. Now, it is critical to understand that what is meant by privileges to users in a database. The privileges can be defined as “Privileges are a type of permission that lets users perform an action on a database object”. It means that what kind of tasks a user can perform in a database is relied on the fact that what kind of privileges have been given to them. If they are not allowed to do certain tasks, then users can’t proceed with those actions. It means that when users are given some permission to use database from the superuser, these permissions are actually called privileges (Shah, 2017)

 The other most important thing associated with the database is roles, which are given to users, and these roles actually determine that what kind of access has been given to the users of a database. To understand that what is meant by roles in database reference, then good examples to understand this concept are the roles such as user, admin, public or manager. It is important to define these roles, because it is easy to manage a database with these roles. For instance, if superuser adds anything in the database, and he/she wants that only admins should be able to see that change, then superuser can set the privilege that only admins can see this. It is also said that “RolePermissions is where you will put the individual page permissions” (Stack Exchange Inc., 2015)

To understand the roles and privileges etc, it is important to understand what database management is. The definition of database management is that “A database management system (DBMS) is system software for creating and managing databases”. DBMS (Database management system) is referred as the collection of the programs that are required for management of the data. It is also considered as the systems of the software’s that allows the manipulation, storage, extraction and modification of data from the database. The varied users are avail supports for the update, creating, storing, retrieving, and managing the information. (Rouse, 2019)

It can be concluded in the end that in a database system, the relationship between roles and users is crucial in so many ways. It is crucial because it defines that what role is assigned to which user. It also determines that what kind of tasks will be performed by a user with a certain role. It means that a user with a role of admin will certainly perform different tasks as compared to the user, who has been given the role of public in a database system.