I’ve recently wrote an DOAG article about Managing Audit Trails with dbms_audit_mgmt, which has been officially introduced in Oracle 11g R2. The same article will also be in the upcoming SOUG newsletter. The article itself is written in german and is also available on this side in the publication section ( Audit Management mit DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT.pdf)

dbms_audit_mgmt has been officially released as a 11g R2 feature. For earlier releases there is a patch available or it is part of a patchset (10.2.0.5, 11.1.0.7). More information to the availability of this package can be found in the Metalink Note New Feature DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT To Manage And Purge Audit Information [731908.1].

In the article I’ve mentioned the licensing, but could not provide a clear statement. In the meantime I’ve been in contact with Oracle to bring a bit of light into the licensing situation (ok just for dbms_audit_mgmt not for the whole oracle licensing 😉 ). As mentioned in the Metalink Note [731908.1] it is mandatory to have a valid Oracle Audit Vault license when using this package in any versions before 11.2. Starting with 11.2 the dbms_audit_mgmt package is part of the regular release and can be used in the Standard and Enterprise Edition without further licensing.

The official feedback:

… I now have some further feedback from the audit development team, and can confirm this package is available with SE and EE starting with 11.2. No further license is required.

As soon as the remaining bugs are fixed (see Current issues Known Issues When Using: DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT [804624.1] we have a nice and smooth way to handle the audit trails. I’ll probably post a few ideas and examples in one of my next posts.