Using database triggers for alerting and auditing

David M Williams
Friday, 26 February 2010 11:16

Business IT - Security

Whether an enterprise application is custom-built or purchased off-the-shelf, you can always delve under the hood into the database layer to add your own specific functionality, like alerting and auditing when data is modified.

The ‘magic’ for want of a better word that makes this happen is triggers. This is a feature of high-end database systems like Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL that causes program code to execute via the ordinary creating, updating or deleting of data that typically occurs.

Triggers are implemented at the database layer and fired off by the database engine itself. This means you do not need to modify the code within your front-end application that the users see.

This is particularly important and beneficial when the program code is not in your control anyhow, like a third-party application.

It is also of value when you have multiple interfaces to your data – perhaps via a web app, a fat-client app and a mobile app – whether you can maintain the source code or not. In this case, the trigger can be created within the database and applies no matter how the user is working.

There are, of course, some catches.

I'll describe these on page two, and then give working T-SQL trigger code on page three to illustrate.