In SAP HANA, as in most of SAP's software, authorizations are grouped into roles.

A role is a collection of authorization objects, with their associated privileges. It allows us, as developers, to define self-contained units of authorization. In the same way that at the start of this book we created an attribute view allowing us to have a coherent view of our customer data which we could reuse at will in more advanced developments, authorization roles allow us to create coherent developments of authorization data which we can then assign to users at will, making sure that users who are supposed to have the same rights always have the same rights. If we had to assign individual authorization objects to users, we could be fairly sure that sooner or later, we would forget someone in a department, and they would not be able to access the data they needed to do their everyday work. Worse, we might not give quite the same authorizations to one person, and have to spend valuable time correcting...