Re: Automatic auditing suggestion

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Scott Chapman wrote:

> In my further discussion with Andrew offline, we came up with a joint
> suggestion to have PostgreSQL do automatic auditing. This would be VERY
> NICE, imho. Any input?
>
> Scott wrote:
> > It seems like it would be nice if you could flip a toggle on a
> > table and have it automatically build audit entries in another table.
>
> Andrew replied:
> > Yeah - that would be a great feature - automatic auditing...
> > Maybe you should post that to someone (whoever it would be?) at
> > PostgreSQL - sure, there would be major performance hit problems (maybe
> > rather than at table level, field/column level would be better), but it
> > would be a boon for many...

I like the idea. It would be kinda nice to do:

create table test (name text, id serial primary key)
with audit
(id keyid, 10 cycle,fifo|stop);

and have an auditing table with a historical view of the table up to 10
deep per key, and either have it either fifo them so the ones older than
10 disappear or have it stop inserts into the parent when the history gets
too deep.

I'd guess the proof of concept could be done in plpgsql, with the with
audit part programmed as a before trigger.