Auditing your database means tracking access and changes to your
data and db objects. The Audit Log Plugin has been shipped
with Percona Server since 5.5.37/5.6.17, for a little over
12 months. Prior to the Audit Log Plugin, you had to work in
darker ways to achieve some incarnation of an audit trail.
We have seen attempts at creating audit trails using
approaches such as ‘sniffing the wire’, init files, in-schema ‘on
update’ fields, triggers, proxies and trying to parse the
traditional logs of MySQL (slow, general, binary, error). All of
these attempts miss a piece of the pie, i.e. if you’re sniffing
tcp traffic you’ll miss local connections, parsing binary logs
you’re missing any reads. Your reasons for audit logging
might be down to compliance requirements (HIPAA, PCI DSS) or
you may need a way to examine database activity or track the
connections incoming.
Over the past …
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