I have a need to do auditing all database activity regardless of whether it came from application or someone issuing some sql via other means. So the auditing must be done at the database level. The database in question is Oracle. I looked at doing it via Triggers and also via something called Fine Grained Auditing that Oracle provides. In both cases, we turned on auditing on specific tables and specific columns. However, we found that Performance really sucks when we use either of these methods.
Since auditing is an absolute must due to regulations placed around data privacy, I am wondering what is best way to do this without significant performance degradations. If someone has Oracle specific experience with this, it will be helpful but if not just general practices around database activity auditing will be okay as well.
I’m not sure if it’s a mature enough approach for a production system, but I had quite a lot of success with monitoring database traffic using a network traffic sniffer.
Send the raw data between the application and database off to another machine and decode and analyse it there.
I used PostgreSQL, and decoding the traffic and turning it into a stream of database operations that could be logged was relatively straightforward. I imagine it’d work on any database where the packet format is documented though.
The main point was that it put no extra load on the database itself.
Also, it was passive monitoring, it recorded all activity, but couldn’t block any operations, so might not be quite what you’re looking for.