Auditing data changes

This recipe provides different ways of collecting changes to data contained in the tables for auditing purposes.

Getting ready

First, you must make the following decisions:

• Do you need to audit all changes or only some?
• What information about the changes do you need to collect? Only the fact that the data has changed?
• When recording the new value of a field or tuple, do you also need to record the old value?
• Is it enough to record which user made the change, or do you also need to record the IP address and other connection information?
• How secure (tamper-proof) must the auditing information be? For example, does it need to be kept separately, away from the database being audited?

Based on answers to...