Auditing is an important part of your database application if you have any sensitive information.

Our database systems become more important to the operation of our world all the time. We store data from sensors, back commerce systems, and more. We know software has bugs, and there will be security lapses, perhaps even from insiders. I suspect that as our software evolves, auditing will become more and more important all the time.

This week I’m curious to what extent you have auditing in your environment. For some of us it’s included in the software we write, for others we might have to retrofit auditing when some issue occurs, but most applications I’ve used have very limited auditing or logging capabilities.

How extensively is auditing deployed in your environment.

Whether it’s something simple like a Trace or Extended Events, the built-in SQL Audit, or some third party product, what percentage of your applications use some sort of auditing or logging? Is it a requirement, perhaps for certain types of systems? Or is it rarely implemented?

I think auditing will become more prevalent in the future, perhaps even a core function that we expect to find in every piece of new software.

Steve Jones

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