During Oracle ASM installation, you can use one operating system group for all users or divide system privileges so that database administrators, storage administrators, and database operators each have distinct operating system privilege groups.
Whether you create separate operating system privilege groups or use one group to provide operating system authentication for all system privileges, you should use SYSASM to administer an Oracle ASM instance. The SYSDBA privilege cannot be used to administer an Oracle ASM instance. If you use the SYSDBA privilege to run administrative commands on an Oracle ASM instance, the operation results in an error. The SYSDBA privilege is intended to be used by the database to access disk groups.
Oracle also recommends the use of a less privileged user, such as ASMSNMP with SYSDBA privileges that is created during installation, for monitoring the Oracle ASM instance.
Operating system authentication using membership in the group or groups designated as OSDBA, OSOPER, and OSASM is valid on all Oracle platforms. Connecting to an Oracle ASM instance as SYSASM grants you full access to all of the available Oracle ASM disk groups and management functions.
This section contains these topics:
For information about privileges and Oracle ACFS, see "Oracle ACFS and File Access and Administration Security".