Building Audit Frameworks Across Multiple Platforms
By Tom Nonmacher
In the era of data-driven decision making, auditing your databases across multiple platforms has become a critical task. It is essential to ensure that your data is consistent, accurate, and secure. As such, we will explore how to build an audit framework using SQL Server 2019, MySQL 8.0, DB2 11.5, Azure SQL and Azure Synapse.
SQL Server 2019 offers a feature called SQL Server Audit. This feature helps to create server audits, which can track and log events that occur in the server. You can configure it to write audit logs to file, security log, or application log. Here is a sample T-SQL code snippet to create a server audit:
USE master;
GO
CREATE SERVER AUDIT ServerAudit
TO FILE (FILEPATH = 'C:\SQLAuditLogs', MAXSIZE = 2 GB)
WITH (ON_FAILURE = CONTINUE);
GO
ALTER SERVER AUDIT ServerAudit
WITH (STATE = ON);
GO
MySQL 8.0, on the other hand, comes with an Audit Plugin that provides the capability to log server activity. The operation of the audit plugin is controlled by system variables that affect general auditing characteristics. Here is a MySQL code snippet to enable the audit log:
INSTALL PLUGIN audit_log SONAME 'audit_log.so';
SET GLOBAL audit_log_policy = 'ALL';
SET GLOBAL audit_log_format = 'NEW';
In DB2 11.5, we use the AUDIT statement to control the database system's auditing facilities. After activating the audit facility, you can specify what types of activities are to be audited. Below is a DB2 SQL code snippet to enable auditing:
db2 connect to sample
db2 "update db cfg for sample using audit_buf_sz 500"
db2 "update db cfg for sample using audit_path '/home/db2inst1'"
db2 "audit database start with failure continue"
Azure SQL provides Auditing for Azure SQL Database and Azure Synapse Analytics. It tracks database events and writes them to an audit log in your Azure storage account. Here's a PowerShell command to enable auditing in Azure SQL:
Set-AzSqlServerAudit -ResourceGroupName "ResourceGroup01" -ServerName "Server01" -State Enabled -StorageAccountName "Storage01"
In conclusion, auditing is a crucial aspect of database management and governance. Building robust audit frameworks across multiple platforms ensures data integrity, security, and compliance. By leveraging the capabilities of SQL Server 2019, MySQL 8.0, DB2 11.5, Azure SQL, and Azure Synapse, you can efficiently manage and monitor your data across various platforms.