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Security and administration

The database administrator is responsible for the overall effective operation of the database. This includes among other things security, user management and performance. You have already seen some of the activities needed in each of these areas, and this week we will be bringing them together and adding a little more detail.

In this set of notes, we will be using some technical terms from the security and administration domains, and it is useful to have the definitions in advance:

Term Definition
Authentication The process of identifying a user
Authorisation The process of allocating appropriate access rights to a user
Compromise General term for exposing data to unauthorised access or other damage
Countermeasure Action taken to prevent or resolve a security threat
Credentials The security details used to gain access - typically username and password
Privilege A specific access permissions that can be allocated to a user
Threat A situation which has the potential to damage the database system of its contents

Further reading

SQL Injection Tutorial

Database Backup and Recovery User's Guide