A profile realm is an organizational group of external user profiles that are associated with one or more sites. Users who can log into a site can also log into any other site in the same profile realm. Within a profile realm, users must have unique login identifiers. Users may share the same login identifier if they are in separate profile realms.

Use profile realms to control user access to your sites. When your Web application creates an external user record, it creates the record in the context of the profile realm associated with the site on which the user is registered. The external user can only access the sites within that realm.

A site can be a member of only one profile realm. If multiple sites are part of a sharing group and they share data (for example, a shopping cart), all of the sites in the group must be associated with the same profile realm. See Sharing Data.

Oracle Commerce Platform includes one profile realm by default. The name of this profile realm is “Default Profile Realm.” All sites are included in this profile realm unless you choose to include them in profile realms that you create.

See additional information about profile realms in the locations shown in the following table.