Designing a reporting layer that protects sensitive data takes more than hiding tables behind a view. You must understand how schema permissions and ownership chaining interact, or a well‑meant deny can suddenly block your users—or worse, let them see columns you thought were private. The walk‑through below shows the entire life‑cycle of a common scenario:
- Build an HR table that holds confidential columns.
- Expose a summary view in a separate schema.
- Grant a reporting role access to the view but explicitly deny access to the HR schema.
- Break the ownership chain, observe the failure, diagnose the cause, and repair it by realigning ownership.
Read on to learn more. Note that this is all within a single database, so we aren’t talking about the cross-database ownership chaining setting. That setting being on immediately raises red flags for me.