This blog will address how the MariaDB Auditing Plugin can help monitor database activity to help with security, accountability and troubleshooting.

Why Audit Your Databases?

Auditing is an essential task for monitoring your database environment. By auditing your database, you can achieve accountability for actions taken or content accessed within your environment. You will also deter users (or others) from inappropriate actions.

If there is any bad behavior, you can investigate suspicious activity. For example, if a user is deleting data from tables, the admins could audit all connections to the database and all deletions of rows. You can also use auditing to notify admins when an unauthorized user manipulates or deletes data or that a user has more privileges than expected.

Auditing Plugins Available for MySQL

As Sergei Glushchenko said in a …

Percona has developed an Audit Log feature that is now included in Percona Server since the recent 5.5 and 5.6 releases. This implementation is alternative to the MySQL Enterprise Audit Log Plugin: Percona re-implemented the Audit Plugin code as GPL as Oracle’s code was closed source. This post is a quick introduction to this plugin.

Installation
There are two ways to install the Percona MySQL Audit Plugin:

INSTALL PLUGIN audit_log SONAME 'audit_log.so';

or in my.cnf

[mysqld]
plugin-load="audit_log=audit_log.so"

Verify installation

mysql> SHOW PLUGINS\G
...
*************************** 38. row ***************************
  Name: …

Percona Server version 5.6.17-65.0

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.6.17-65.0 on May 6th, 2014. Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.17, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.17-65.0 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. All of Percona’s software is …