Auditing in Oracle

Question

I need some help in auditing in Oracle. We have a database with many tables and we want to be able to audit every change made to any table in any field. So the things w

Answer 1

You don't need write your own triggers.

Oracle ships with flexible and fine grained audit trail services. Have a look at this document (9i) as a starting point. (Edit: Here's a link for 10g and 11g versions of the same document.)

You can audit so much that it can be like drinking from the firehose - and that can hurt the server performance at some point, or could leave you with so much audit information that you won't be able to extract meaningful information from it quickly, and/or you could end up eating up lots of disk space. Spend some time thinking about how much audit information you really need, and how long you might need to keep it around. To do so might require starting with a basic configuration, and then tailoring it down after you're able to get a sample of the kind of volume of audit trail data you're actually collecting.