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Adding users to an ArcSDE geodatabase

Adding users to an ArcSDE geodatabase

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Note:This topic was updated for 9.3.1.

Different steps are taken to add a user to an ArcSDE geodatabase depending on what type of database management system (DBMS) you use to store your geodatabase and whether you want to use operating system (OS) authentication or database authentication to connect to the geodatabase.

For ArcSDE geodatabases for SQL Server Express (ArcSDE database servers), existing Windows logins are added to the database server in ArcCatalog. See Adding and removing users or groups for ArcSDE database servers to learn how to add users to ArcSDE geodatabases for SQL Server Express.

If you have an ArcSDE geodatabase licensed through ArcGIS Server Enterprise, use either the management interface provided by the DBMS to add and administer users or use structured query language (SQL) commands. To learn the specific steps necessary to add a login to or create a database user account in your database, consult your DBMS documentation.

NOTE: Database user names must start with a letter; use of numeric user names is not supported.

NOTE: User names (including OS-authenticated user names, which include the domain or computer name and a backslash) cannot exceed 32 characters total.

Users and schemas

In some DBMSs, such as Oracle and SQL Server 2000, there is a one-to-one relationship between database users and schemas; when you create a database user, there is automatically a schema created with the same name. The geodatabase relies on this relationship.

In SQL Server 2005 and later releases and also in PostgreSQL, the DBMS does not require user names and schema names to be the same; however, the geodatabase does. Therefore, if you use PostgreSQL or SQL Server 2005 or 2008 to store your geodatabase, for each user who will own data that you add to your database, you must also create a schema with the same name and make the user of the same name the owner of the schema. It is recommended that you create a schema of the same name for read-only users as well, so that if the user's permissions later change, the necessary schema will already exist. In ArcSDE geodatabases for SQL Server Express (ArcSDE database servers), this is done for you automatically when a user is added to the database server. For ArcSDE geodatabases licensed with ArcGIS Server Enterprise, you must do this through the DBMS user interface or SQL.

NOTE: Once the user has been created using the DBMS user interface or SQL, you will likely need to grant specific permissions to that user. See User permissions for more information.

For PostgreSQL databases, also remember to grant AUTHORIZATION to the user on their schema, so they will own all the data in their schema, and to grant USAGE permission on schemas to any other users you want to have access to the data in that schema.

For further discussion of the schema model change that took place between SQL Server 2000 to 2005, see Users and schemas on SQL Server 2005.

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See Also

  • User permissions