Database Object Modification Auditor

Abstract

Usages of databases are becoming very important day by day in many aspects of software industry, with the combinations of various improvements in Database Management Systems (DBMS). Tables, views, triggers, stored procedures/packages and sequences are some of the database objects that we use very frequently. There are number of different user categories who involve with databases. Therefore even a very little modification done for a single database object can spoil the work of all the other people who are working on the same database. This issue results due to the changes which are done specially using Data Definition Language (DDL) operations concurrently in any database. The solution was designed with an implementation in the database to maintain the changes done for the database objects and also including a client interface. This solution maintains all the versions of individual database objects and not the versions of entire schema. Schema level triggers were used in order to capture modification details and those triggers get fired whenever a DDL operation is performed. Set of inbuilt functions of oracle was used to extract details of different system events. The retrieved information were stored in separate history tables by categorizing them based on the database object, modification type, modified user, modified date and time. Oracle relational database was focused in order to implement a solution for the above mentioned problem through this project. Client interface was developed using C# language. This client interface provides a user-friendly mechanism to view the history of database object altering information in the database and also some additional features which can perform on top of the history details.