On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 2:50 PM, Rajesh Mallah <mallah.rajesh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I am referring to audit trigger as described inHi ,
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Audit_trigger_91plus OR
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Audit_trigger Although there are documented limitations for these systems , butI would like to mention and seek suggestion on a limitation that I feel is biggest .It is very a common design pattern in web-applications that the same databaseuser is shared for making database changes by different "logged in users" of the
web application.I feel the core of audit is all about "who" , "when" and "what" .In the current audit trigger the "who" is essentially the ROLE which is the actor of
the trigger , but in most scenarios the user associated with the web-application session
is the one that is seeked.In one of my past projects I passed the web-user to the trigger by setting a postgres
custom variable during the database connection and reading it inside the triggerand storing it in the audit log table.
This is a good method, and one of the best for just straight auditing. The other trick I've seen is to use the 'application_name' field. Developers would issue:
SET application_name = "app_user:app_name';
This can be read from pg_stat_activity.application_name. I believe you'd be able to read that in a procedure with 'show application_name'; and, you can see it live in pg_stat_activity as well.
select application_name, count(*)
FROM pg_stat_activity
GROUP by application_name;
You'd be able to see each user/app pair and the number of sessions that were using to the DB at a given time.
--Scott
I am curious how others deal with the same issue , is there better or more inbuilt solutionsto store the application level user in the audit trail records.Regdsmallah.
