February 13, 2014 at 5:35 am
Hello all,
I am building the backend of a web application and came across a scenario for the audit logging table design that I would to receive some opinions on.
There are 2 audit tables.
Table: AuditType - Contains all of the audit types
Fields: AuditTypeID, Type, Description, CreatedBy, CreatedOn, ModifiedBy, ModifiedOn
Table: AuditLog - The associated record for each Audit Type/activity we would like to record.
Fields: AuditLogID, UserID, AuditInformation, AuditDate, AuditTypeID, CreatedBy, CreatedOn, ModifiedBy, ModifiedOn
Those two tables will be reacting to the following events (AuditType): Password Change, Logins, Logouts, Login Failure, SessionTimeout, LoginCreation, LoginDeletion
The client would like to record more detail of what occurs with the user login information. Below are two tables with fields for each login profile.
Table: UserProfile - Contains basic user login information
fields: UserDetailId, UserID, FirstName, LastName, BusinessPhone, CellPhone, PrimaryEmail, SecondaryEmail, StreetAddress, CityID, Zip, BusinessTitle, WebAccess, Createdby, Createdon, ModifiedBy, ModifiedOn.
Table:UserCustomerRelation - Linking table to associate UserProfile Records to Customers
Fields: UserCustRelationID, UserID, CustomerId, FromDate, ToDate, CreatedBy, CreatedOn, ModifiedBy, ModifiedOn
Now if a field in the UserProfile table is modified we would like that action logged. For instance if a user with a login of jsmith had 2 new customers added to his login via the UserCustomerRelation table, those new record creations would be logged.
My initial thought is to expand the AuditTypes to include new types: Customer Add, Customer Remove,Street Address Change, Primary Email Address, First Name, Last Name, Web Access.
This way when any of these fields in the UserProfile table are modified a trigger would write to the AuditLog table with the correct type.
Is this thought the optimal way of logging such activity?
what is a more optimal way to perform logging?
Would a separate trigger need to be created for each field we wish to log?
February 17, 2014 at 2:51 pm
Would a separate trigger need to be created for each field we wish to log?
No. Inside one trigger you can test whether a column was changed by using the UPDATE(fieldname) built-in function. This tests whether that field had a change as a result of the calling INSERT or UPDATE to the table that's involved.
Your triggers could look something like this for every action you want to log:
CREATE TRIGGER MyTRigger
ON UserCustomerRelation
AFTER UPDATE,INSERT
IF UPDATE(LastName)
INSERT INTO AuditLog(UserID, AuditInformation, AuditDate, AuditTypeID)
SELECT UserID ,'New LastName was added: ' + LastName,CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,[IDforCustomerAdd]
FROM INSERTED
GO
...where you would repeat that UPDATE() test for each important field that might have changed, all inside of the same single trigger.
Is this thought the optimal way of logging such activity?
what is a more optimal way to perform logging?
That highly depends on what it is you'd like to get out of logging and how you plan to analyze/report on the audits. What does management actually want to know down the road? What kind of histories do they want to see?
The way you're looking to do it seems like an awful lot of records every time someone updates more than one aspect of their profile. If a woman gets married and changes last name and address, for example, your approach here requires more than one audit record just for that one profile update. Not very streamlined, but we don't know here what sort of history you'll want to see down the road.
Some shops are happy to prevent any UPDATEs to the table from the application, they'll only add a whole new record for each profile change, keep the ID# (which you could store uniquely in another table) and date stamp it to be the current record for that ID, while the old record is marked with the same date stamp as its expiration date. That way you could produce a whole history of full record changes for any ID you want without any audit procedures & triggers and the processing & space overhead that comes with them. But that's just one approach.
Hth,
-Ed
February 17, 2014 at 9:12 pm
eheraux (2/17/2014)
Would a separate trigger need to be created for each field we wish to log?
No. Inside one trigger you can test whether a column was changed by using the UPDATE(fieldname) built-in function. This tests whether that field had a change as a result of the calling INSERT or UPDATE to the table that's involved.
Oooh, be careful about that. The UPDATE(fieldname) function detects only whether or not the field was part of the triggering action, not whether the value actually changed or not. If you update (for example) a LastName column from "Smith" to "Smith", it will still be registered as a "change" even though the value didn't actually change. You'd need to compare the INSERTED to the DELETED tables to find out if the value actually changed. Of course, you'd use the UPDATE(filedname) function as the "short circuit" to see whether the column needs such a check or not. Shifting gears a bit, you wouldn't even need that if the trigger was doing "whole row" auditing instead of "field level" auditing.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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