How to set an Oracle user's default schema?

I created a few new users in Oracle. However, when running sqlplus, they all need to fully qualified the table names in query. What's the best way to set a default schema for these new users?

There is nothing like PostgreSQL's set search_path in Oracle.

The closest thing I can think of would be a logon trigger for the user that run's an ALTER SESSION SET CURRENT_SCHEMA ...

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER LOGON_TRG 
  AFTER LOGON ON SCHEMA
BEGIN
     EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'ALTER SESSION SET CURRENT_SCHEMA = foobar';
EXCEPTION 
  when others 
    then null; -- prevent a login failure due to an exception
END;
/

If the list of users isn't too long, you can create a database logon trigger so you don't have to create that trigger for each user:

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER LOGON_TRG 
  AFTER LOGON ON DATABASE
BEGIN
    if (user in ('TOM', 'DICK', 'HARRY')) then
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'ALTER SESSION SET CURRENT_SCHEMA = foobar';
    end if;
exception 
  when others 
    then null; -- prevent a login failure due to an exception
END logon_trg;
/

Of course the list of users where you want to change the default schema, can also be taken from a table. In that case you only need to insert or delete rows from there in order to "activate" this feature (rather than re-creating the trigger each time).

Another option would be to create synonyms each time you create user that point to the real tables. You could automate that using a stored procedure that loops through all tables in one schema and creates the synonyms for them in the other schema.

Unless all your Oracle users work on the same tables I would strongly advise against using public synonyms which you would have to create only once - they can cause a lot of trouble if different application users exist in your installation.

Edit:

Following Alex's suggestion, here is a logon trigger that checks the role rather than a username:

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER LOGON_TRG
  AFTER LOGON ON DATABASE
declare
  has_role boolean;
BEGIN

    has_role := dbms_session.is_role_enabled('FOOBAR_ROLE');

    if (has_role) then
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'ALTER SESSION SET CURRENT_SCHEMA = foobar';
    end if;
exception 
   when others 
      then null; -- prevent a login failure due to an exception    
END logon_trg;
/

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#27869, answer score: 23