User profiles were introduced in Oracle7 as a way that the DBA could limit the amount of system resources that could be consumed by any particular user. In Oracle8, user profiles have been expanded to support password control. There are two flavors of profiles, resource control and password control, discussed in the following sections.

Profiles are created using the CREATE PROFILE command and can be altered with the ALTER PROFILE command. At database creation time, a single profile, named DEFAULT, is created. You can use the DBA_PROFILES data dictionary view to determine which profiles have been created, and the values of each of the limits contained in the profiles.

If a profile is not specified for a user in the CREATE USER command, the DEFAULT profile is used. A user’s profile can be changed with the ALTER USER command. You can use the DBA_USERS data dictionary view to see which profile has been assigned to a given user.