Question

I have written some C# which connects to a live production database. I want to give my application read only access to the DB but am unsure how to achieve this.

Is there any trivial way to get this done by amending the connection string?

My understanding is that the application will logon with the credentials of the person running the application and hence may or may not have write access to the db based on that fact. Can I statically limit the permissions of the application so that if someone changes the program to do something devastating at a later date any manipulation will fail?

Apologies for how trivial the question may be but it’s my first venture into the world of MS programming.

Thanks,

Gav

Answer 1

You can’t change the permissions for the account by changing the connection string. There is a user account in the database that determines the permissions.

Unless you want different people to have different permissions, you should set up an account for the application and use in the connection string.

For any account in the database you can specify which databases it can access, and what it can do with the databases. The permissions can be specified down to the level of objects and operations, so you can for example specify that it can only do selects on certain tables.