Is there a way to see the history or any other information of insertions into a specific table of an SQL Server database?
Unless you are recording this information somewhere using a trigger, you would need some way of looking at the information in the transaction log. There are commercial tools like Lumigent for this.
You could use a trigger
Create a trigger on the table watching for inserts, updates, and deletes). The trigger would insert into another table (a history table).
This adds extra overhead, though, so I wouldn't do this on a really heavily updated table.
Look at this page for an example of how this is done.
This page has some code that generates the audit trail code for you.
Here is another SOF question about doing this using triggers.
If you are using SQL Server 2008, you can use the new Change Data Capture feature. This saves you from having to write triggers on all your tables.
For 2005 use triggers, for 2008 you can use the change data capture.
Aside from using a trigger, you could do something like add a column named "InsertedDate" and record the current date there. This would require you do your insertions through a stored procedure though.
Related
I am developing a product which uses an Oracle database (11g). The product will most likely have to be customised for each client - this may involve changing PLSQL functions slightly or modifying a view for instance. My question is: is there any way of automatically keeping a record of structural changes like this, and perhaps saving it to a table for future reference? Or will it have to be a more manual process e.g just remembering to insert a row into a log table describing any changes that have been made?
Thanks!
If you are talking about DDL commands, those can be tracked with DDL triggers. Create DDL trigger which inserts to some audit table.
More info:
http://psoug.org/reference/ddl_trigger.html
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_ddl_triggers.htm
I have a profile page (less than 10k users) and I need to track every change and update that is made through out the application, by the users. Whether a user updates the profile picture or adds an extra space in a "comments" field, I need to store the previous data.
In short: I need to store everything.
Is there some sort of "tracking-history-and-changes-in-sql-server" software or do I have to implement it myself?
If I have to implement it myself I can think of three ways to do it:
I keep everything in the same table
but I add a key column that
specifies which row is active
and which is old.
I add a new table called history
where I store the column name that had the
change, when it was changed and what
the old data was.
I add a history table for each table
in the database. It looks the same
but only keep track of each tables
history.
Has anyone had a similar problem and how did you solve it?
This was built using mvc 4 and it's a
normal website.
EDIT
I'm mostly interested in existing solutions/software, but If there are none I would have to do it myself.
Has anyone used SQL Data Compare?
Where I worked last everything had to be logged fully. (working with goverment organisations). We never updated or deleted data.
What you would do is have a start date and an end date on each row. To do an update you would update the old data to have an enddate then insert a new row in the table. To do a delete you would put an enddate on the row with a null enddate. We also had an "updated by" column to put the userid
I used the third approach to do that but didn't create a history table for all tables of my DB but history tables for most important tables. You can use triggers to do that , create trigger for Update. You can read more about Triggers here and here
Microsoft offers Change Tracking and Change Data Capture for awhile now. These technically offer the tracking of all your changes in your database, which suits your purpose. Just note that CT is available in most versions, whereas CDC used to be only available in Enterprise until SQL Server 2016, where they made it available for Standard too.
ApexSQL Log does pretty much the same as well, but if you're using SQL Server then it's integrated in your software already.
have you considered enabling full transaction logging on your database and then using some of the log reading tools to monitor data changes. ApexSQL Log is by far the best log reader on the market but there are other solutions out there. SQL Log Rescue from Red Gate is free but it's only for sql server 2000.
Using this approach you dont need to make any other changes in your database or in your application since every transaction is automatically logged when database is in full recovery mode.
Hope this helps.
When the table's rows are changed, these changed rows are written to XML, and let me know that the table has been changed.
How can I do this?
If you're looking for a strict TSQL or SQL Server solution:
write a stored procedure to handle UPDATE, DELETE and INSERT functionality.
deny UPDATE, DELETE and INSERT to users
allow EXEC to users on this new stored proc
on each call to the stored proc, make an entry into another table, specifically built for auditing.
write a SQL Job to poll this audit table for new records. Use SQL Mail to send email. You weren't clear about what kind of notification you wanted, but I assumed email.
2nd less attractive solution: You could also use triggers on the table to capture the UPDATE, DELETE and INSERT activity. Strongly consider the stored proc solution over triggers.
If you can't alter how data is being changed in your table, the best solution would be to setup a trigger to capture changes in a separate table, and then write some code to periodically poll this table, and build your xml file.
Its worth noting that this will potentially slow down your db performance when editing data in this table (good for audit when users are making changes, bad for programatically changed data), and any errors coming from the trigger lead to quite misleading messages thrown back out of sql server.
See this question for some pointers on setting up the trigger.
I need to create in my DB a log, that every action in the program should be written there.
I will also want to store additional data to it for example have the table and row the action was applied to.
In other words I want the log to be dynamic and should be able to refer to the other tables in the database.
The problem is, I don't know how to relate all the tables to this log.
Any ideas?
You have two choices here:
1) modify your program to add logging for every db access
2) add triggers to each table in your db to perform logging operations.
I don't recommend one logging table for all tables. You will have locking issues if you do that (every insert, update and delete in every table woudl have to hit this one, bad idea). Create a table for each table that you want to audit. There are lots of possible designs for the table, but they usually include some variant of old vlaue, new value, date changed, and user who did the change.
Then create triggers on each table to log the changes.
I know SQL Server 2008 also has a systemic way to set up auditing, this would be easier to set up than manual auditing and might be enough to lure your company into using 2008.
I have a problem with a Database at my work. There is currently auditing in place, but its clunky, requires a lot of maintence, and it falls short in a few regards. So I am replacing it.
I want to do this in as generic of a way as possible and have designed the tables, and how everything will link and be updated.
Now, thats all fine and good, but I want to be able to write a generic way to insert records into these audit tables. (Without having to enter a command for each column in each table being changed.)
Is there anyway within a Stored Procedure to iterate over all the columns in a table? And I would like to write this in such a way that it will work with several tables, and automatically pickup and audit added columns and such.
Any ideas?
EDIT: Guess I should Clarify. I will be auditing data that is in the tables. But I will be using the same table(s) to store the audited data for every table in the database.
And I can not use Triggers because usually, when an update occurs, it occurs across multiple tables, but I would like all of these updates to be part of a single Change Set.
That is not a problem, because I can do all the Updates from within a single Stored Proc. I would just prefer some way like a loop, that i can get all the updated fields, figure out which ones changed, and the insert those changed ones into the audit table.
And I would like to do this without have a long list of if statements and insert statements for each column. (By doing this in a generic loop, it will handle added columns automatically and not be bothered by deleted columns)
By "added columns" I guess you are looking to audit DDL. If you use SQL 2005, then you want this link.
If don't use SQL 2005, then you probably want to either use one of the many SQL schema comparison tools, like SQL Red Gates tool set probably has something in there.
If you don't have $ for tools, then you might just want to run periodic queries against information_schema.tables and information_schema.columns. By periodically capturing these in permenant tables, you can identify when they have gained or lost rows (and hence a schema changed occured)
If you are doing data audit instead, then you'll want want to code generate some triggers, again using information_schema.tables and information_schema.columns.
There would be performance considerations, but you could add insert and update triggers to all of your tables, and have the triggers insert into your audit tables.
Use DDL Triggers (assuming you have SQL Server 2005+)!
http://www.sqlteam.com/article/using-ddl-triggers-in-sql-server-2005-to-capture-schema-changes
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189871.aspx
That could be done if you were using a data access layer that could trap which tables and columns are being update and generating the insert statements for the audit table. In a stored procedure? Which stored procedure? Do you have a single one that does updates? Or are you creating one per table?
If it's an option for you, just upgrade to sql server 2008 and turn on Change Data Capture.