Limiting user access to your database

There are situations where you need to grant SELECT permission to a particular user and limit that access to a particular OBJECT, say a TABLE.

Here’s a quick way of accomplishing this. In this example we’re using the AdventureWorks2008R2 database.

I have already created the LOGIN in advance ("TestUser01"). Let's map that to a USER Object:

The next step is to set the permission on the particular table we want the user to access:

You can further restrict access at the Column Level by setting the Column Permission as needed. Using the HAS_PERMS_BY_NAME function in SQL Server, let's check if we've granted user TestUser01 the SELECT permission he needed for the Employee table:

The HAS_PERMS_BY_NAME function returns true (1) or false (0) to indicate whether permission has been granted or not.

The good thing about HAS_PERMS_BY_NAME is that, it is accessible to the Public role - meaning Users with minimal access level can run a query containing the function. Or if you are an Admin and you want to test a newly altered user you can impersonate that user:

That should give us the same result shown above. This is how it looks like when TestUser01 logs in to the AdventureWorks2008R2 database: