Fine Grained Auditing in Oracle

Fine Grained Auditing

The Fine Grained Auditing feature allows monitoring of a SQL statement in greater detail. It compliments the regular AUDIT feature provided by Oracle for years. Auditing provides the basic information about access. The Fine Grained Auditing feature provides even more detailed information. The level of detail provided by the Fine Grained Auditing feature includes, but is not limited to:

    The Complete SQL Statement executed on the object.

   

    Bind values and the user executing the statement

   

    System Change Number (SCN) information

In previous versions, only SELECTs can be audited using Fine Grained Auditing. Oracle10g extends the Fine Grained Auditing to Data Manipulation Languages. The following Data Manipulation commands can be audited using Fine Grained Auditing.

•     INSERT
•     DELETE
•     UPDATE
•     MERGE

If any of the audit columns is present in the DML statement, the column is audited by default. However, there is an option provided to audit based on ANY or ALL of the columns that are used in the statement.

Newly improved audit trial supports the SQLTEXT and SQLBIND values. The AUDIT_TRIAL parameter now takes the additional value DB_EXTENDED and when setting this parameter it captures the SQLTEXT and SQLBIND values. The dictionary table AUD$ has two additional clob columns to capture and store the information.

SYS> desc aud$;

 Name                                      Null?    Type

 ----------------------------------------- -------- -------------

 SESSIONID                                 NOT NULL NUMBER

 ENTRYID                                   NOT NULL NUMBER

 <Input.. Truncated>

 SQLBIND                                            CLOB

 SQLTEXT                                            CLOB

Audit table SYS.AUD$ is stored in the SYSAUX tablespace. In previous versions this table was stored in the SYSTEM tablespace.