DEMIDS is an early paper on how to detect errant use of a database. As an overview, the paper describes a system where misuse is ‘detected’ by the use of a distance function. It attributes a set of tables or database functions as the normal domain of a user, and everything that the user accesses outside of that specified domain has some distance factor associated with it. Tables in other schema’s are viewed as being a certain distance outside of that domain, and tables in different database further still. The further away a resource is, the more likely there is misuse. It is a basic assumption that the users are sufficiently privileged to perform the access. And it is inherent with the methodology described that the system is closely coupled to the database itself, and it performs the work of detection locally.