Elements that can be audited in Oracle

Auditing is the process of monitoring and creating a record of selected user activities in your Oracle database. As you might imagine, there is a cost associated with creating an audit record of database activities, which is the key reason why you normally audit activities only if you have reason to think that there may be a problem.

Oracle gives you the ability to perform three different types of audits:

1. Statement auditing-Statement auditing tracks the execution of a SQL statement, regardless of the database object the statement operates on.
2. Privilege auditing-Privilege auditing tracks the use of certain privileges, such as the use of the CREATE TABLE statement. Privilege auditing is primarily used to track down potential security violations.
3. Schema object auditing-Schema object auditing can track the execution of specific statements on specific database objects. Schema object auditing is the most focused of the three types of auditing.

Each of the different types of monitoring tracks slightly different information, but all types of auditing track the following:

1. The name of the user performing the action
2. The session and terminal identifier of the user performing the action
3. The name of the object accessed
4. The operation performed or attempted
5. The completion code of the operation
6. A date and time stamp for when the action was attempted, provided that this type of data is relevant to the type of auditing being done

In the next lesson, you will learn how to enable the auditing feature of your Oracle database.