Enterprise Domains

An enterprise domain is a group of databases and enterprise roles. An example of a domain could be the engineering division in an enterprise or a small enterprise itself. Figure 1-3 shows an example of an enterprise domain called Services that resides under the OracleDBSecurity entry in an identity management realm. It is here, at the enterprise domain level, that the enterprise domain administrator, using Oracle Enterprise Manager, assigns enterprise roles to users and manages enterprise security.

An enterprise domain subtree in a directory is composed of three types of entries: enterprise role entries, user-schema mappings, and the enterprise domain administrator's group for that domain. Enterprise domains are used to manage information that applies to multiple databases. All user-schema mappings entries contained in an enterprise domain apply to all databases in the domain. If you need to apply different user-schema mappings to individual databases, then use database server entries, which are discussed in the following section.

Enterprise roles apply to specific databases in the domain, as explained in the previous section. Enterprise roles, domain-level mappings, and the domain administrators group are all administered by using Oracle Enterprise Manager.