Summary

Auditing is a complementary part of the security process. Prevention and access control will always be important in security. However, auditing should not be overlooked. Providing the detection and response capabilities can be equally, if not more, important. Auditing effectively is critical to ensuring that performance and the value received from the auditing are congruent.

Oracle standard and fine-grained auditing (FGA) provide a powerful and secure way to ensure user accountability. Standard auditing allows for auditing to occur in many different ways to meet many different requirements. FGA augments this and allows for a higher fidelity in auditing, which reduces the number of extraneous audit records. The event handler can be used to do many powerful things. The auditing acts as both the detection and response system for the database. Similar to motion detectors that are wired to notify the police, the event handlers in FGA can be used to alert administrators of serious incidents the instant that they occur. Instant notification is essential to guarding the data.