How to Resolve ORA-65175: cannot grant SYSDBA privilege locally in the root

ORA-65175

Tried to grant SYSDBA privilege to SYSTEM, but it failed with ORA-65175.

SQL> show user
USER is "SYS"
SQL> grant sysdba to system;
grant sysdba to system
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-65175: cannot grant SYSDBA privilege locally in the root

ORA-65175 means that you cannot grant SYSDBA to an user only in the root container, which means, you should grant it globally or in a PDB.

Let's see what container we are currently in.

SQL> show con_name

CON_NAME
------------------------------
CDB$ROOT


Solutions

Now we have 2 options to solve ORA-65175.

Grant SYSDBA in CDB

In a root container, we should grant SYSDBA privilege to a common user like SYSTEM globally, that is, CONTAINER=ALL.

SQL> grant sysdba to system container=all;

Grant succeeded.

Please note that, common user in a multitenant database has been redefined very differently from our sense. That's why we should grant it with CONTAINER=ALL.

Grant SYSDBA in PDB

That's right, we can grant SYSDBA privilege in a PDB only.

Let's switch to the PDB first.

SQL> show user
USER is "SYS"
SQL> alter session set container=orclpdb;

Session altered.

Then we grant SYSDBA privilege to the user.

SQL> grant sysdba to system;

Grant succeeded.

We solved it.