Oracle schema user cannot create table in procedure

Question

I'm trying to create a temporary table in a procedure:

PROCEDURE pr_create_tmp_bp_table(fp_id NUMBER) IS
    tbl_name CONSTANT VARCHAR2(20) := 'BP_TO_DELETE';
BEGIN
    -- sanity checks removed for readablity

    EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 
        'CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE ' || tbl_name || ' ' ||
        'ON COMMIT PRESERVE ROWS AS ' ||
        'SELECT * FROM infop_stammdaten.bp';

END;

If I copy the BEGIN.._END block to a SQL worksheet everything works fine. So I think the user has the right to create a temporary table. If I execute the procedure from the same SQL worksheet I get

Fehlerbericht -
ORA-01031: Nicht ausreichende Berechtigungen
ORA-06512: in "INFOP_STAMMDATEN.PA_DELETE_FP", Zeile 16
ORA-06512: in Zeile 6
01031. 00000 -  "insufficient privileges"
*Cause:    An attempt was made to perform a database operation without
           the necessary privileges.
*Action:   Ask your database administrator or designated security
           administrator to grant you the necessary privileges

Line 16 (Zeile 16) point to the EXECUTE IMMEDIATE statment that creates the temporary table.

To me this look like the user does not have the same rights in the sql work sheet and when it executes a procedure, also the procedure is in it's own schema.

Answer 1

The answer to your immediate question is that you get ORA-01031: insufficient privileges because your user has the CREATE TABLE privilege granted through a role: the Oracle security model enforces a rule that we can't use privileges granted through roles in PL/SQL. So you need your DBA to grant the CREATE TABLE privilege to your user directly.

Or do you?

Because what you are trying to do does not make sense in Oracle. In Oracle global temporary tables are permanent structures; it's just the data in them which is temporary. So, the correct solution is to build the table once with a normal DDL script, like any other database object. Then you can just insert into the global temporary table as you need to.

You are not the first person on this site to make this mistake (read this pertinent thread). Often it's because people are coming from another database such as SQL Server which has a construct called "temporary table" which is actually different from Oracle's global temporary tables. If that's your scenario then you will be interested in an Oracle 18c new feature called Private Temporary Tables. These are exactly analogous to SQL Server temporary tables. Find out more.