While I’m enjoying the functionality of the new Referenced Mosaic Dataset that have been introduced in ArcGIS10, something that I stumbled over recently was administering the privileges to a referenced mosaic dataset.

A referenced mosaic dataset is a raster datatype that uses a mosaic dataset as a base.  For example, we loaded a series of DEMs into a mosaic dataset and then created a referenced mosaic dataset that does the meters to feet conversion for us.  This saved us from having to process each DEM before loading it.  We also created a referenced mosaic dataset hillshade from the original meter data.

The problem I came across, and this was more my oversight than anything, but I had a heck of a time trying to grant privileges to the referenced mosaic dataset.  The solution was actually very simple–I needed to also grant access to the mosaic dataset that was being used as the base.

That makes some sense, you should not be able to grant access to a dataset (the referenced mosaic dataset) that would inadvertently be exposing data (the base mosaic dataset) that a user does not have access to.  This, however, conflicts a bit in that the permissions on individual rasters that make up a mosaic raster dataset are ignored.