2 ms·

Access control gets complicated though. Maybe a column should be accessible to a user, but only under x, y, z conditions that require hundreds of lines of logic

• RNCTX 6y ago
  It certainly does. I've been at a company that had an improper permission result in a CSR getting elevated access and deleting the whole customer database, including every single credit card number, by mistake (admittedly this was back in like 2002). Better still, the devops guy who wrote the backup scripts had recently quit, and they were broken, the backups weren't being done. The company-saving backup from the previous day wound up being on an internal tools developer's laptop. I wasn't a database admin there or responsible for the permissions, but it was quite a wakeup call for everyone to double check their stuff when the rumors of what happened got out of the meetings the next day. The counter argument is, would it better to have 10, 20, 100 such possible situations mulling around the building every day, or just one? Maybe if there's just one, you put enough effort and people into the one to get it right. That's the pitch for AD / LDAP being used for all auth and permissions, and I think a compelling one at that.