Question

Question:

Is there a way to make view PERSON for user jack point to some main person table, lets call it MAIN_PERSON and also to create a view PERSON for user jill and have it point to that same MAIN_PERSON table, the difference being, for example, that jack has access to only the men, and jill only has access to the women.

Details:

Here is how I would like to set up my tables/views

PERSON table:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS person
(
   id            INT NOT NULL auto_increment,
   male          BOOLEAN,

   PRIMARY KEY(id)
)
engine=innodb;

View for jack:

CREATE VIEW person_for_jacks_eyes_only
AS
SELECT * FROM person
WHERE
person.male = TRUE;

View for jill:

CREATE VIEW person_for_jills_eyes_only
AS
SELECT * FROM person
WHERE
person.male = false;

Create users and grant privileges:

GRANT SELECT ON DB.person_for_jacks_eyes_only TO jack@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '1234';
GRANT SELECT ON DB.person_for_jills_eyes_only TO jill@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '1234';

Motivation:

I want to give different users access to only a subset of the rows. From my understanding, this is one of the purposes of views (the other being to combine multiple tables together). I, however, do not want to have obscure view names like person_for_jacks_eyes_only, hence why I want to make user specific local names. If this is the wrong way to use views, could someone please be as kind as to point me in the right direction.

Answer 1

No, there is not. There is a single global namespace for tables and views; there is no way to create multiple views with the same name.

I believe you could, however, declare a view whose output depends on the current user:

CREATE VIEW limited_person AS
    SELECT * FROM person
    WHERE person.male = (USER() = 'jack@localhost')