Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful opensource database management system; now recognized as the expert's choice for a wide range of applications, it has an enviable reputation for performance and stability. PostgreSQL provides an integrated feature set comprising relational database features, object-relational, text search, Geographical Info Systems, analytical tools for big data and JSON/XML document management. Starting with short and simple recipes, you will soon dive into core features, such as configuration, server control, tables, and data. You will tackle a variety of problems a database administrator usually encounters, from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database, and from using monitoring tools to using storage engines. Recipes based on important topics such as high availability, concurrency, replication, backup and recovery, as well as diagnostics and troubleshooting are also given special importance. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to run, manage, and maintain PostgreSQL efficiently.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Auditing data changes

This recipe provides different ways of collecting changes to data contained in the tables for auditing purposes.

Getting ready

First, you must make the following decisions:

  • Do you need to audit all changes or only some?
  • What information about the changes do you need to collect? Only the fact that the data has changed?
  • When recording the new value of a field or tuple, do you also need to record the old value?
  • Is it enough to record which user made the change, or do you also need to record the IP address and other connection information?
  • How secure (tamper-proof) must the auditing information be? For example, does it need to be kept separately, away from the database being audited?

Based on answers to...