How To Grant SELECT Object Privilege On One or More Tables to a User

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use the Oracle GRANT statement to grant SELECT object privilege on one or more tables to a user.

Grant SELECT on a table to a user

To grant the SELECT object privilege on a table to a user or role, you use the following statement:

GRANT SELECT ON table_name TO {user | role};
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

The following example illustrates how to grant the SELECT object privilege on a table to a user.

First, create a new user called DW and grant the CREATE SESSION to the user:

CREATE USER dw IDENTIFIED BY abcd1234;

GRANT CREATE SESSION TO dw;
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Second, grant the SELECT object privilege on the ot.customers table to the dw user:

GRANT SELECT ON customers TO dw;
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Finally, use the dw user to log in to the Oracle Database and query data from the ot.customers table:

SELECT COUNT(*) 
FROM ot.customers;
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Here is the output:

  COUNT(*)
----------
    319
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Grant SELECT on all tables in a schema to a user

Sometimes, you want to grant SELECT on all tables which belong to a schema or user to another user. Unfortunately, Oracle doesn’t directly support this using a single SQL statement.

To work around this, you can select all table names of a user (or a schema) and grant the SELECT object privilege on each table to a grantee.

The following stored procedure illustrates the idea:

CREATE PROCEDURE grant_select(
    username VARCHAR2, 
    grantee VARCHAR2)
AS   
BEGIN
    FOR r IN (
        SELECT owner, table_name 
        FROM all_tables 
        WHERE owner = username
    )
    LOOP
        EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 
            'GRANT SELECT ON '||r.owner||'.'||r.table_name||' to ' || grantee;
    END LOOP;
END; 
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

This example grants the SELECT object privileges of all tables that belong to the user OT to the user DW:

EXEC grant_select('OT','DW');
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

When you use the user DW to login to the Oracle Database, the user DW should have the SELECT object privilege on all tables of the OT‘s schema.

In this tutorial, you have learned how to grant the SELECT object privilege on one or more tables to a user.