Oracle11g Case Sensitive Passwords

A Change for Oracle11

Some of my best material comes to me in interesting ways. I usually use all lower case syntax with Oracle. I recently taught a class using an 11g database and some folks had issues logging in.

Oracle11g IS Case Sensitive on Passwords

Oracle11g is now case sensitive with passwords. When new accounts are created, the password is indeed case sensitive.

You can see the case sensitive setting in SQL+ by using ‘SHOW PARAMETER SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON’. People with DBA privileges can see the password status using ‘SELECT USERNAME, PASSWORD_VERSIONS from DBA_USERS;’. This list will show both migrated users and new users password status.

Migrating from older releases…

When migrating from older releases, the passwords are preserved and they are NOT case sensitive until they are changed, and they are only case sensitive only if the above SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON is still set to TRUE.

Changing the Settings

Because I do training and I’m not interested in case-sensitive passwords, I ran the following 2 commands to disable this feature on my Oracle11R1 database.

Command prompt: orapwd file=orapwDB11Gb entries=100 ignorecase=y password=’’;

Connect as SYSDBA and enter:

ALTER SYSTEM SET SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON = FALSE;

Summary

Be prepared for this subtle change in Oracle11 logon behavior!