Owner names

The owner name is the identifier of the user (or of a pseudo-user, for an owner like informix that does not correspond to the login name of an actual user) who is associated with the creation of a database object.

The owner name qualifies the identifier of the database object, which the owner typically can modify or drop. A synonym for the term owner name is authorization identifier. Unlike SQL identifiers, an authorization identifier cannot be longer than 32 bytes.

The ANSI term for owner name is schema name. In an ANSI-compliant database, you must specify the owner name as a qualifier of the identifier of any database object that you do not own.

Non-ASCII characters are not valid in an owner name unless your operating system supports those characters in user names.

If your database server is on a UNIX™ system, the owner-name qualifier defaults to the UNIX login ID. Most versions of UNIX, however, do not support multibyte characters in UNIX login IDs.

Important: You specify multibyte characters in an owner name at your own risk. If a UNIX login ID is used to match the owner name, the match might fail if the UNIX system does not support multibyte characters in login ID names. In this situation, if you create a database object without explicitly specifying an owner name, the owner name defaults to the UNIX login ID. It will attempt to reference the same database object by qualifying its identifier with an owner name that includes multibyte characters and fail because a string of only single-byte characters cannot match any string containing multibyte characters.

In some East Asian locales, an owner name can include multibyte characters when you create database objects and specify an explicit owner. For example, you can assign an owner name that contains multibyte characters when you specify the owner of an index (within quotation marks) in a CREATE INDEX statement. The following statement declares an index with a multibyte owner name. In this example, the owner name consists of three 2-byte characters:

CREATE INDEX 'A¹A²B¹B²C¹C²'.myidx ON mytable (mycol)

The preceding example assumes that the client locale supports a multibyte code set and that A¹A², B¹B², and C¹C² are valid characters in this code set.