ORA-01031 Insufficient Privileges Raised From Within Function When I run a CREATE USER statement within Sql Developer, the user is created just fine.  When I try to call a function which performs CREATE USER (followed by a bunch of other statements) I get the ORA-01031 error when that statement is executed.  On another machine this function is apparently completing successfully.  I have checked all the roles and system privileges but nothing stands out.  What could it be?
When you have permission to perform an action at the command line but not within a definer's rights stored procedure (and I hope you're using a stored procedure here, not a stored function), the problem is almost certainly that the privilege you need has been granted through a role, not directly to the user that owns the procedure.  Inside a definer's rights stored procedure, only privileges that have been granted directly to the owner of the procedure can be used-- privileges granted through a role (such as DBA) cannot be used.

You can verify that the problem is, in fact, that the privilege is granted through a role by disabling roles and then trying to create the user, i.e.

SQL&gt; set role none;
SQL&gt; create user ...


Assuming that fails, as I expect it will, you would need to grant the owner of the function the CREATE USER privilege directly

SQL&gt; grant create user to &lt;&lt;owner of procedure&gt;&gt;


Then, you should be able to create users even with roles disabled and the stored procedure should work.