My Security Policy is bypassed

My Security Policy is bypassed??? Sept 28, 2010

There is a privilege called EXEMPT ACCESS POLICY

Assume that there is a policy in effect for a specific object in a specific schema. If the DBA issues the following command

SQL>Grant EXEMPT ACCESS POLICY to SCOTT;

The Scott will bypass all enabled policies on all object within Scott.

This could be critical in production system and will immediately show adverse effect on such systems.

Our DBA seems to have granted this privilege while trying to export a schema probably to avoid this warning.

EXP-00080: Data in table "TRANSACTIONS" is protected

This is a legitimate warning, because if you are exporting a schema thinking that all rows will be exported, it is a good place to remind you that there is a policy in effect and therefore, and depending on the policy function, not all rows might be exported.

Whilst granting this privilege before export might make sense, but not revoking it afterwards is a NO NO situation. We wasted the entire afternoon trying to find out why the application is not behaving correctly during a User acceptance test despite the fact that QA team reconfirmed that their testing was successful.