Fine-grained access control for querying a database with low overhead and safety plans. In a view placement approach, base relations of the query expression are replaced by views that are appropriate for the particular user. Information leakage via UDF pushing, exception processing, and error messages can be prevented by generating safe plans. An existing query optimizer can be modified to perform redundancy removal and safe plan implementation. Subsumption testing available in materialized view matching can be exploited by the query optimizer. Authorization inference is exploited to generate safe plans.