Trudy Pelzer, Engineering Project Manager extraordinaire at MySQL, has added a new section to the Forge wiki detailing the design specs for a proposed simple data auditing functionality for future versions of MySQL. Feel free to provide Trudy your feedback on the proposal and comment either on the Wiki itself, or email Trudy personally at trudy at mysql dot com. What exactly is the simple data auditing functionality?

Well, the proposal outlines essentially an updated logging mechanism that combines some of the features of the slow query log, general query log, and other mechanisms into a method of auditing commands, authentication, and even errors, to log files (or tables) within the server. Essentially, we’re talking about writing log tables of everything that goes on inside the server, to ensure that in the case of an audit or a security breach, it is possible to determine what exactly happened, when it happened, and who did it.