DatabaseAudit

Database Auditing

You might want to either audit who has changed the data, or what the specific data changes were. There are a number of options available to you:

• Use Spring Transaction Manager/Interceptor

Spring should help you do this pretty easily. You would setup a filter/manager at the service layer (extending/implementing the normal transaction manager) that inspects the request and inserts an audit record when appropriate. Then change your service config files to use that manager instead of the transaction manager.

• Hibernate auditing

Hibernate supports a flexible audit logging mechanism. Check out "Chapter 13 : Interceptors and events" in the Hibernate 3 Reference documentation or "Section 8.3.2 : Audit Logging" in Hibernate in Action for a detailed coverage on topic.

• Database triggers

A traditional way of auditing what data changes have been made is by using triggers and creating mirror audit tables for any tables you want to audit (ie. user_audit). The triggers will fire when a modification to a record occurs, and write to the audit table, writing the state of the record and who made the modification.

• Oracle 9i now has auditing features built in

• You could use log4j to configure a special audit log file and write to that

• You could software like this that sits between Hibernate and the DB