Auditing
Just as monitoring resource usage is an important way to understand performance issues, auditing is a way to track usage in the database and to become aware of potential security issues.
For some time, Oracle has allowed three different types of auditing:
- Statement auditing
Audits the statements issued on the database, for specific users or for all users.
- Privilege auditing
Audits the use of system privileges for specific users or for all users.
- Schema object auditing
Audits a specific set of SQL statements on a particular schema object.
Oracle9i also allows a fourth type of auditing, called fine-grained auditing, which is explained in the final section of this chapter.
For all types of auditing, Oracle writes audit records to a database audit trail or the SYS.FGA_LOG$ table or in binary format to an operating system file. The audit trail records contain different information, depending on the type of auditing and the options set for the auditing.