Question

In the context of large corporate databases with many users, what is a "role" and why are "roles" useful?

Answer 1

A large corporate database consists of many number of users and the database administrator will experience difficulty in granting privileges to all the users. To solve this problem, the DBA groups the users depending according to the type of privileges they require and each group is assigned a database role. A role is a collection of privileges assigned to a group of users and known by a single name.

Roles are useful as it helps the DBA to add or remove privileges from a role whenever he wants to. The changes made will automatically apply to all the users in the group. This way the management of large corporate databases with many users becomes easy for the DBA.