What is Database Auditing?

Question

What is database auditing and how to use it. Is that any advantages using a database auditing...??

Answer 1

Database Auditing is used for three things:

1. Monitoring for resource bottlenecks

       Certain criteria like how fast queries are returned can be correlated to see when spikes occur, and at times you can see broken queries this way.

2. Monitoring for errors

       Auditing can be turned on in most systems to alert you when critical errors occur. Critical errors can be things like database corruption, someone dropping a table, or a record lock being stuck on for a ridiculous amount of time.

3. Security

     Security auditing includes people making reads/writes that are outside the paramaters of the application (like if the app will only write to a single row at a time in each table, and someone writes to 50 you can have the statement flagged), you can also audit successful and failed logins. It's amazing how many developers decide to login with an application userid/password to do database work, and sometimes problems occur and nobody fesses up.