Can someone please explain what an auditing fields or auditing transations are? In general, what does Oracle mean when they say auditing. I just don't get it.

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Hi Odonata,

Auditing is the monitoring and recording of selected database actions made by users (not administrators!).

Investigate suspicious activity: for example deletion of orders in a production environment or granting privileges to other users (who did it and when - maybe someone wants to ask why ;-) )

Audit connections: why are some people connecting late in the night outside their normal working schedule?

Monitor use of table - gather I/O information for performance tuning etc.

Normally there are very special reasons why auditing is turned on (tracking everything would be a waste of disk space and reducing performance).

It is not just out of curiosity - as an administrator you are responsible for the database and also for data integrity. In larger environments a DBA-job is like herding sheep - sooner or later you have to grant more privileges to other users (for example to delete orders or to create tables). Auditing is a way to track those privileged activities.

Hope that helps,

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laLocA

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Thank laloca,

That definitely helped. While I was studying and reading about certain triggers, some of them would say used for auditing.

Then I ran across this question in my reading:

Which triggers can help you add auditing functions to your application?

I still do not quite know the answer, but your explenation makes it a little more clear. Thank you.

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Hi Odonata,

let me guess - you're preparing for SQL/PL-SQL ? In the beginning I was quite confused about those details too .. if you prepare for Architecture and Administration many things will become clearer.

Regarding your question I quoted some lines out of the Oracle docu:

"This example creates an AFTER statement trigger on any DDL statement CREATE. Such a trigger can be used to audit the creation of new data dictionary objects in your schema.

CREATE TRIOGGER audit_db_object AFTER CREATE
ON SCHEMA
pl/sql_block "

For example: a DBA could use a trigger (instead of turning database auditing on) to monitor the creation of new objects made by developers. Each time one (successfully) creates a table, view, procedure, function, package etc. the trigger could send a mail including the creation details to the DBA.

More detail is not really neccessary for this exam. Be sure to understand how triggers work and what's their purpose - and to memorize the exact syntax - apart from "pl/sql block").

Wish you good luck,

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laLocA

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Hello,

Thanks!!

Preparing for Forms I exam, in 4 hours!! :O
(I skipped Program Units for now, guess I should have done that one first! )

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I wish you the very best for your exam!!!

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laLocA

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yeah! I passed my exam this weekend. Just missed 5 questions. What a relief!!

On to Program Units...

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CONGRATS!

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laLocA

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