Comparing the effort: Auditing and Scheduling a database task

To continue our studies about Comparing the effort: Migrating a database and Managing security, analyze two more resources:

8) Audit

The task Audit refers to how to implement a way to identify who entered, changed or deleted a row in a table. Such audit is also known as audit trail.

Oracle has specific database features for audit (functions in packets) and also a specific application for this purpose called the Oracle Audit Vault that provides, among other resources, mechanisms for implementation and have compliance with security rules, such as SOX, PCI, and HIPAA. The SQL Server has recently received the CDC featured (Change Data Capture) that allows the audit of the basic lines of the tables. Both PostgreSQL and MySQL does not have native resources specific to implement this type of audit which must be created by programming triggers or reading the information coming to the SQL database. A comparison of the level of difficulty to the task Audit is presented in Table 1.


Table 1. Comparison of the level of difficulty to the task Audit.

9) Task Scheduling
The task Tasks scheduling is about how the databases allow the management of tasks without user interaction (jobs) that can be scheduled to run periodically or occasionally.

SQL Server has a special service for this schedule called SQL Server Agent, which control the managing of jobs, alerts and notifications. Oracle has Oracle Scheduler that also allows the scheduling of Jobs but does not contain notification features. MySQL allows the basic scheduling of tasks through the database objects called events while PostgreSQL natively does not have the ability to schedule tasks being dependent on some feature of the operating system (scheduler or crontab) or the external resource PgAgent available from pgAdmin III (an external tool for PostgreSQL administration). A comparison of the level of difficulty to the task Task scheduling is presented in Table 2.


Table 2. Comparison of the level of difficulty to the task Task scheduling.

In the last part of this series, we discuss Trace instructions and the conclusion.