Hi Mladen, Your suggestion is wonderful. It will make my life so much easier - I'll look after the read only account if you wouldn't mind dealing with the other 999 non-read only users on the system. Now what digits do you need to put in front of that 121 extenstion? (just so I can add it to the application splash screen...) - Charlotte Mladen Gogala <MGogala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: The trick that will disable modifications from procedures is to do the following, logged in as SYSDBA: startup force mount alter database open read only Your read-only user will not be able to modify anything in the database, regardless of the procedures that he has access to. -- Mladen Gogala Ext. 121 --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Jazz up your holiday email with celebrity designs. Learn more. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l