Before you begin auditing, you should decide what kind of audit data storage solution you want to implement. Making this decision ahead of time, before you are faced with an accumulation of audit data in need of storage, eliminates having to find a suitable solution under pressure.
Within the context of auditing,short-term audit data storage refers to the auditing data tables of an OpenEdge database where the audit records are initially created. The short-term storage is configured to run very fast because it has no requirements to be the source for an audit report generator or to store large amounts of audit data.
Long-term audit data storage refers to the auditing data tables of an OpenEdge database that is dedicated to the storage and long-term management of audit data. Long-term storage is configured for optimal performance for storing large amounts of audit data (that has been consolidated from many sources), generating complex audit reports that require full indexing support, and providing additional security.
You can use the audit data tables in your applications database for long-term storage and keep the data permanently in the same database as your application data. For reasons related to providing security, maintaining audit data tables of a reasonable size (which affects performance), and making it easier to report on the data, it is recommended that you move the audit data recorded by each database to a separate database that is configured for that purpose. However, if the added security is not required and there are no size, performance, or reporting concerns, there is no functional reason why you have to move the data.
You can record your applications audit events with those recorded by the OpenEdge database. Direct the applications audit events to specific databases by loading the appropriate audit policy into each database, or direct it to the long-term storage.
For more information about audit data storage and archiving, see the relevant sections in OpenEdge Data Management: Database Administration.
