1Tony Austin  27/11/2009 23:32:57  Database-User Activity: da domino 8.x maggior dettaglio per inserimenti, cancellazioni, aggiornamenti

Ciao Vincenzo, da Down Under!

Yes, it is definitely an improvement to record the Adds, Updates and Deletes separately. However, when you say it answers the question "chi ha rubato la marmellata?" what it does is answer only "who MIGHT have stolen the jam" and not "who ACTUALLY stole the jam."

This is better than before, but not the complete story, since it still doesn't tell you what was deleted or changed, exaclty when each event occurred, and so on. You might get the desired information from the Statlog server task, but this doen't help for database actions performed while the user is disconnected from any server.

If you want a full audit trail, you need to write some code, perhaps using examples and tips from various web sites and blogs, or a couple of the tools available from OpenNTF.org to save you some effort.

There are some commercial offerings that go much durther. For example, over the last ten years or so, I developed and enhanced a commercial developer toolkit (SDK) that I call NotesTracker, which records a lot of details about users who perform CRUD actions (Create, Read, Update, Delete) as well as other things. The tracking of document deletions proved the hardest, because of the way that deletion works in Notes/Domino, and this is expalined in the NotesTracker Guide (free to download, from http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation or http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation ).

I've had some people ask me questions like "Can I determine who deleted certain important documents from my database back in 2007?" (or quite a few months ago, anyway).

But they become very disappointed when I have to advise them that unless they already had switched on either the built-in tracking that you've described (the "Record activity" option), or had a roll-your-own tool or commercial like NotesTracker installed and configured to track deletions, they will not be able to discover the culprit before such tracking was activated.

Certainly not three or four years back, for sure! In fact, according to the Admin Help database under the topic "Managing database activity recording in databases" apparently on 64K is allocated to this native activity tracking, so you cannot rely on it to keep more than a certain amount of history, I would guess the history goes back only a few weeks or months depening on how busy the database is.

The other tools would enable you to retain such tracking history as far back as you like. ... But only while the tracking was actually recording the CRUD activities, of course.

2Vincenzo  03/12/2009 10:16:35  Database-User Activity: da domino 8.x maggior dettaglio per inserimenti, cancellazioni, aggiornamenti

Hi Tony,

I agree with you,

The database user activity can be a good way to find clues but it can't be used as "evidence of crime"

3Tony Austin  03/12/2009 21:51:52  Database-User Activity: da domino 8.x maggior detail per instrument, cancellation, ornament

Ciao Vincenzo! I hope that now you have fixed your blog (so that it doesn't disallow comments being made, due to spam filtering) that now you will lots of people adding useful commentary to your blog. In Italiano o Inglese o forse "Australiano" (G'day, mate) o "Americano" (Hi, buddy) ...