A principal element of a secure system is accountability. One way to ensure accountability is to audit events on the system. Many events that occur in Adaptive Server can be recorded.
Auditing is an important part of security in a database management system. An audit trail can be used to detect penetration of the system and misuse of resources. By examining the audit trail, a System Security Officer can inspect patterns of access to objects in databases and can monitor the activity of specific users. Audit records are traceable to specific users, which may act as a deterrent to users who are misusing the system.
Each audit record can log the nature of the event, the date and time, the user responsible for it, and the success or failure of the event. Among the events that can be audited are logins and logouts, server boots, use of data access commands, attempts to access particular objects, and a particular user’s actions. The audit trail, or log of audit records, allows the System Security Officer to reconstruct events that have occurred on the system and evaluate their impact.
The System Security Officer is the only user who can start and stop auditing, set up auditing options, and process the audit data. As a System Security Officer, you can establish auditing for events such as:
Server-wide, security-relevant events
Creating, deleting, and modifying database objects
All actions by a particular user or all actions by users with a particular role active
Granting or revoking database access
Importing or exporting data
Logins and logouts
