Oracle in a Nutshell

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.