How to deal with DBMS_RLS

These last weeks I am trying to get the VPD option (Virtual Private Database) enabled for my application. This time as a developer with no DBA or SYS privileges. I am used to being a DBA for the databases I work on and am used to being able to get the fullest out of the Oracle database. For one, because I think Oracle provides us with a great deal of built-in features that do things more efficiently than we can do ourselves (more efficient, built-in kernel code) and also especially because it seems useless and time-consuming to write code that is already supplied by built-in packages. Now these provided features may not all be as intuitive as we want to or lack some important features, but that is where we can spend some time extending them or making them more user-friendly by creating “wrapper” packages: packages you write that hide the complexity or unfriendliness of a built-in package or limit the features you can use. Because there are quite some packages out there that contain functions or procedures or even parameters that you do not want to give to your developers or end users.