The grant operation assigns access rights to users. To delegate access rights to other users, a user must “own” these rights. The set of access rights includes select, insert, update, and delete and refers to the right of executing each of these operations on a table. Further, update can be restricted to specific columns.
All these access rights are granted to the creator of a table automatically. The creator, in turn, may grant access rights to other users or to all users (designated in SQL as public). The SQL standard envisions a mechanism that can limit the excessive proliferation of access rights. Namely, a user may receive the select right with or without the right to grant this right to others by his own action.