Happy (Audit) Trails to Oracle E-records Management

lthough electronic records have been around since the first databases, regulations about how to manage them are coming onto the scene only now. Legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability) set standards for access, security of records, retention, and replacement of paper-based records.

This article discusses the management of electronic records in Oracle using audit trails, mechanisms for preventing previously stored information from being altered or corrupted. An audit trail is a time-stamped record of the changes that users make to a record. It contains the name/identification of the user who performed the modification and typically also includes the reason for the change. An audit trail enables you to audit the system for a record of alterations, as well as to reconstruct the data at a specified point in time.

The following are the various facets of audit trails for electronic records:

• Audit tools
• Event selection (selective auditing)
• Audit data generation
• Automatic response
• Audit analysis
• Storage and archiving

This tutorial addresses the following issues from the system designer, developer, and IT staff points of view:

• Constituents of an electronic record
• Audit trails
• Database design
• Application security mechanisms
• Bulk-data capture and processing issues
• Background processing
• Application, system, and data-migration
• Oracle User Administration
• System administration
• Procedural mechanisms

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