ORA-00903: invalid table name when selecting from USER

I have a task of connecting to a legacy Oracle 9i database and validate users with the new ERP, however when I try to run the query, I get ORA-00903: invalid table name

This is the naive query I am starting with: SELECT * FROM USER. The table does exist, and I can view it’s content using an “in-house database browser” made by some company that no longer exist and to which I do not have the source code for.

Obviously, SELECT * FROM ALL_USERS is not what I want, etc.

The point is to validate that some user credentials are valid, the most fundamental concept of authentication, against a table called “USER”, with two fields: USER_NO and PASSWORD (all values stored in plain text (… yeah… I know).

Answer

user is a reserved keyword. If you want to use that for a table name you have to quote it (which you already had to do when creating it)

select *
from "USER";