Connection to Oracle without a username or password

Question

Oracle has this concept of allowing database users to be identified by the operating system user who is running the program that is connecting to Oracle. See here.

This allows you to do, as that user on a unix machine for example, a command such as:

sqlplus /

I am attempting to write a Java program for Oracle 10.2 which connects without a username or password. The obvious choice of url:

jdbc:oracle:thin:/@localhost:1521:MYDBSID

doesn't work, giving an error (Sorry I don't have the error available right now).

I have attempted many other forms of doing this as well, but with no luck.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can connect a Java program to Oracle using the OS identification method?

Answer 1

The jdbc driver that oracle ships does NOT have the capability of gathering the OS username and password from the URL that you provide it. Suppose, there are 3rd party JDBC driver providers for ORACLE, one of them might provide the functionality that you're asking for. you should google around.

Answer 2

The jdbc thin driver is a 100% Java implementation that cannot collect the needed info from the operating system.
The jdbc oci driver however can do this, use "jdbc:oracle:oci8:/@MYDBSID", it will require that the oracle driver be installed on the machine, not a problem if this is a server (and is faster to boot and supports many more features than the thin driver).

Answer 3

If you're accessing Oracle from a J2EE appserver, you could achieve a similar end by using JNDI to acquire a datasource.

Answer 4

Thanks to those that answered. We've gone with the OCI driver.

I did find documentation to suggest that Oracle 11g does support OS user authentication via the thin driver though:

http://www.orindasoft.com/public/Oracle_JDBC_JavaDoc/javadoc1110/oracle/jdbc/OracleConnection.html#CONNECTION_PROPERTY_THIN_VSESSION_OSUSER

I don't have an 11g setup to test this on, so I can't be certain this works.

Answer 5

The 11g thin driver can connect using Kerberos authentication.

See Connect to an Oracle database using Kerberos