USERENV

Syntax

Description of the illustration userenv.gif

Purpose

Note: USERENV is a legacy function that is retained for backward compatibility. Oracle recommends that you use the SYS_CONTEXT function with the built-in USERENV namespace for current functionality. See SYS_CONTEXT for more information.

USERENV returns information about the current session. This information can be useful for writing an application-specific audit trail table or for determining the language-specific characters currently used by your session. You cannot use USERENV in the condition of a CHECK constraint. Table 7-19 describes the values for the parameter argument.

All calls to USERENV return VARCHAR2 data except for calls with the SESSIONID, SID, and ENTRYID parameters, which return NUMBER.

Table 19 Parameters of the USERENV Function

Parameter	Return Value
CLIENT_INFO	CLIENT_INFO returns up to 64 bytes of user session information that can be stored by an application using the DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO package. Caution: Some commercial applications may be using this context value. Refer to the applicable documentation for those applications to determine what restrictions they may impose on use of this context area. See Also: Oracle Database Security Guide for more information on application context, CREATE CONTEXT, and SYS_CONTEXT
ENTRYID	The current audit entry number. The audit entryid sequence is shared between fine-grained audit records and regular audit records. You cannot use this attribute in distributed SQL statements.
ISDBA	ISDBA returns ‘TRUE’ if the user has been authenticated as having DBA privileges either through the operating system or through a password file.
LANG	LANG returns the ISO abbreviation for the language name, a shorter form than the existing ‘LANGUAGE’ parameter.
LANGUAGE	LANGUAGE returns the language and territory used by the current session along with the database character set in this form: language_territory.characterset
SESSIONID	SESSIONID returns the auditing session identifier. You cannot specify this parameter in distributed SQL statements.
SID	SID returns the session ID.
TERMINAL	TERMINAL returns the operating system identifier for the terminal of the current session. In distributed SQL statements, this parameter returns the identifier for your local session. In a distributed environment, this parameter is supported only for remote SELECT statements, not for remote INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE operations.

See Also: in Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide for the collation derivation rules, which define the collation assigned to the character return value of USERENV

Examples

The following example returns the LANGUAGE parameter of the current session:

SELECT USERENV('LANGUAGE') "Language" FROM DUAL;

Language
-----------------------------------
AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1