A number of internal audit events are defined to provide auditing for things like schema changes, audit policy changes, security changes, and database administration functions, for example.

In many cases the information about the internal events needing to be audited is represented as standard metaschema in an OpenEdge database in tables that all begin with underscore and have a negative table number. For example, changing schema results in modifying records in the _file, _field, _index, _index-field, _file-trg, _field-trig, _sequence, _db, _db-detail, _db-option, etc. tables, and changing audit policy involves updating records in the _aud-*-policy tables, and so on.

The audit policy tables are well-defined and facilitate fine-grained control over application tables and fields (_aud-file-policy and _aud-field-policy). These tables drive internal audit event behavior by simply defining audit policies for the metaschema tables. For example, creating a record in the _aud-file-policy table for the _file metaschema table itself controls auditing of table creates, deletes, and updates. Creating records for the _aud-*-policy tables drives auditing of audit policy changes.

OpenEdge includes standard audit policies that define the policy required to drive these internal audit events. OpenEdge Release 10.1 also includes standard reports to assist you with querying the audit data for these internal events. These predefined reports will relieve you from needing too much knowledge of the metaschema tables themselves.

For a list of supported internal audit events, start Audit Policy Maintenance and view the preconfigured OpenEdge audit policies, see the Audit Policy Maintenance Help, or seePreconfigured Audit Policies.