say I have 6 tables.
Workstation
Workstation_CL
Location
Location_CL
Features
Features_CL
I am currently using triggers to do inserts into the "_CL" version of each table with an additional field that denotes whether the change was an "UPDATE", "INSERT" or "DELETE".
the workstation table keeps track of the "modified_by" user. if a user updates the location of a "Workstation" object, the "Location" table gets updated as well as the "Workstation" table. the only modification to the Workstation table is the "modified_by" field so that I will know who made the change.
The problem I am having is when I think about pulling an audit report. How will I link records in the "Location_CL" to the ones in the "Workstation_CL" both are populated by separate triggers.
somehow my question portion was erased. sorry about that.
Question: how can I pull some type of unique identifier to have in both the "Workstation_CL" and the "Location_CL" so that I can identify each revision? for instance, when I pull all records from the "Location_CL" and I see all location changes, pulling the username from the "Workstation_CL" that made the location change?
Give each revision a GUID generated by the trigger. Populate a field (RevisionId) in both tables with the value.
You need 2, maybe 3 columns on each audit table.
1) Timestamp, so you know when the changes were made.
2) User changed, so you can track who made the changes - I assume that Location can change independently of Workstation.
3) You might need an identifier for the transaction, too. I THINK you can get an id from the DB, though I'm not sure.
I don't think you can have an effective report without timestamps and users, though, and I don't think you just have the user on one table.
During the trigger event, I was able to exec the following:
SELECT #trans_id=transaction_id FROM sys.dm_tran_current_transaction
which gives me the transaction id for the current operation.
with that, I am able to insert it in to the corresponding _CL table and then perform selects that will match the auto-gen id's.
Related
I have one table called ClientInfo that stores a client's personal information and another table called EmergencyContactInfo that stores their emergency contact information. Right now I have an update trigger on my ClientInfo table that inserts a single record into a third table called ClientLog if any of their personal information changes. I would also like to create a ClientLog record if the client's emergency contact information changes.
The problem is that the user can change both a client's personal information and their emergency contact information with a single save from my webpage. If I put an update trigger on my EmergencyContact table, then both my triggers will fire and the ClientLog table will insert two new records when I only want one.
From what I understand there is no such thing as an update trigger that spans across multiple tables. What is an alternative approach I could take that would insert a single record when both the client's personal information AND their emergency contact information changes?
Your understanding is correct that a trigger cannot span multiple tables.
There is also no such thing as preventing a trigger from firing.
What you CAN do is include logic in your trigger that prevents it from doing anything if certain conditions are true.
Now I don't know what you're writing to your log table, and what logic you would want to enforce, but an example would be, when the trigger fires, if there is already a log entry (row in the Log Table) for the same Client in the past x hours, then simply don't insert a new row in the log table.
You can even handle multiple row insert/updates with an OUTER JOIN to the log table, or a WHERE NOT EXISTS() clause.
But basically what I'm saying is, let both triggers fire, and in both triggers, check to see if some condition is true/false before writing to the Log Table. Otherwise, do nothing.
You're making this unnecessarily difficult and error prone.
If each data table has a separate log table and it's own trigger, you can ignore the entire issue and just let them work as they're supposed to.
If you want to view the log info together, you can use a JOIN on the two tables when you display the data.
I'm starting a new application and was wondering what the best method of logging is. Some tables in the database will need to have every change recorded, and the user that made the change. Other tables may just need to have the last modified time recorded.
In previous applications I've used different methods to do this but want to hear what others have done.
I've tried the following:
Add a "modified" date-time field to the table to record the last time it was edited.
Add a secondary table just for recording changes in a primary table. Each row in the secondary table represents a changed field in the primary table. So one record update in the primary could create several records in the secondary table.
Add a table similar to no.2 but it records edits across three or fours tables, reference the table it relates to in an additional field.
what methods do you use and would recommend?
Also what is the best way to record deleted data? I never like the idea that a user can permanently delete a record from the DB, so usually I have a boolean field 'deleted' which is changed to true when its deleted, and then it'll be filtered out of all queries at model level. Any other suggestions on this?
Last one.. What is the best method for recording user activity? At the moment I have a table which records logins/logouts/password changes etc, and depending what the action is, gives it a code either 1,2, 3 etc.
Hope I haven't crammed too much into this question. thanks.
I know it's a very old question, but I'd wanted to add more detailed answer as this is the first link I got googling about db logging.
There are basically two ways to log data changes:
on application server layer
on database layer.
If you can, just use logging on server side. It is much more clear and flexible.
If you need to log on database layer you can use triggers, as #StanislavL said. But triggers can slow down your database performance and limit you to store change log in the same database.
Also, you can look at the transaction log monitoring.
For example, in PostgreSQL you can use mechanism of logical replication to stream changes in json format from your database to anywhere.
In the separate service you can receive, handle and log changes in any form and in any database (for example just put json you got to Mongo)
You can add triggers to any tracked table to olisten insert/update/delete. In the triggers just check NEW and OLD values and write them in a special table with columns
table_name
entity_id
modification_time
previous_value
new_value
user
It's hard to figure out user who makes changes but possible if you add changed_by column in the table you listen.
I'm working on a project where we need to have data entered or updated by some users go through a pending status before being added into 'live data'.
Whilst preparing the data the user can save incomplete records. Whilst the data is in the pending status we don't want the data to affect rules imposed on users editing the live data e.g. a user working on the live data should not run up against a unique contraint when entering the same data that is already in the pending status.
I envisage that sets of data updates will be grouped into a 'data submission' and the data will be re-validated and corrected/rejected/approved when someone quality control the submission.
I've thought about two scenarios with regards to storing the data:
1) Keeping the pending status data in the same table as the live data, but adding a flag to indicate its status. I could see issues here with having to remove contraints or make required fields nullable to support the 'incomplete' status data. Then there is the issue with how to handle updating existing data, you would have to add a new row for an update and link it back to existing 'live' row. This seems a bit messy to me.
2) Add new tables that mirror the live tables and store the data in there until it has been approved. This would allow me to keep full control over the existing live tables while the 'pending' tables can be abused with whatever the user feels he wants to put in there. The downside of this is that I will end up with a lot of extra tables/SPs in the db. Another issue I was thinking about was how might a user link between two records, whereby the record linked to might be a record in the live table or one in the pending table, but I suppose in this situation you could always take a copy of the linked record and treat it as an update?
Neither solutions seem perfect, but the second one seems like the better option to me - is there a third solution?
Your option 2 very much sounds like the best idea. If you want to use referential integrity and all the nice things you get with a DBMS you can't have the pending data in the same table. But there is no need for there to be unstructured data- pending data is still structured and presumably you want the db to play its part in enforcing rules even on this data. Even if you didn't, pending data fits well into a standard table structure.
A separate set of tables sounds the right answer. You can bring the primary key of the row being changed into the pending table so you know what item is being edited, or what item is being linked to.
I don't know your situation exactly so this might not be appropriate, but an idea would be to have a separate table for storing the batch of edits that are being made, because then you can quality control a batch, or submit a batch to live. Each pending table could have a batch key so you know what batch it is part of. You'll have to find a way to control multiple pending edits to the same rows (if you want to) but that doesn't seem too tricky a problem to solve.
I'm not sure if this fits but it might be worth looking into 'Master Data Management' tools such as SQL Server's Master Data Services.
'Unit of work' is a good name for 'data submission'.
You could serialize it to a different place, like (non-relational) document-oriented database, and only save to relational DB on approval.
Depends on how many of live data constraints still need to apply to the unapproved data.
I think second option is better. To manage this, you can use View which will contain both tables and you can work with this structure through view.
Another good approach is to use XML column in a separate table to store necessary data(because of unknown quantity/names of columns). You can create just one table with XML column ad column "Type" do determine which table this document is related with.
First scenerio seems to be good.
Add Status column in the table.There is no need to remove Nullable constraint just add one function to check the required fields based on flag like If flag is 1(incomplete) Null is allowed otherwise Not allowed.
regarding second doubt do you want to append the data or update the whole data.
This is certainly a long shot, and is by no means vital to my development requirements, so if there's not a readily available solution the please note; I won't be too upset ;)
I was wondering if there was a way to see if a field value had been changed or updated within a date range in Access.
For example, I have a status field in lets say table1 that may read "active" or "inactive" (simply via validation, no related tables for this field), I would like to see how many records changed from "inactive" to "active" within 30 days.
I have found a solution for timestamping a form update, and if worst comes to worse, I can just amend this to apply to a field, but I would rather be able to search for the value changes than the date the field was last changed.
Again, if this strikes anyone as impossible, then please don't worry yourself too much.
Regards,
Andy
You need to have a change history.
Separate table which stores the key of the row as foreign key, the status and the timestamp. every change inserts new row to the table.
Depending on the technology you are using, the easiest way is to use trigger. The trigger can check if the the field is changed odl.status <> new.status and to insert new row in the history table.
If you do not like to keep history, then only one field in the same table can do the job.
The field can be datetime, and also the trigger can update it when the status is changed.
Timestamp will not do the job because if some other field is changed this field will be changed.
So in this case also the trigger can do the job.
But also depending of the type of the client, the client can detect if the field is changed and update the datetime field.
For my application there are several entity classes, User, Customer, Post, and so on
I'm about to design the database and I want to store the date when the entities were created and updated. This is where it gets tricky. Sure one option is to add created_timestamp and update_timestamp columns for each of the entity tables but that isn't that redudant?
Another possibility could be to create a log table that stores this information, and it could be made to contain keep track of updates for any entity.
Any thoughts? I'm leaning on implementing the latter.
The single-log-table-for-all-tables approach has two main problems that I can think of:
The design of the log table will (probably) constrain the design of all the other tables. Most likely the log table would have one column named TableName and then another column named PKValue (which would store the primary key value for the record you're logging). If some of your tables have compound primary keys (i.e. more than one column), then the design of your log table would have to account for this (probably by having columns like PKValue1, PKValue2 etc.).
If this is a web application of some sort, then the user identity that would be available from a trigger would be the application's account, instead of the ID of the web app user (which is most likely what you really want to store in your CreatedBy field). This would only help you distinguish between records created by your web app code and records created otherwise.
CreatedDate and ModifiedDate columns aren't redundant just because they're defined in each table. I would stick with that approach and put insert and update triggers on each table to populate those columns. If I also needed to record the end-user who made the change, I would skip the triggers and populate the timestamp and user fields from my application code.
I do the latter, with a "log" or "events" table. In my experience, the "updated" timestamp becomes frustrating pretty quick, because a lot of the time you find yourself in a fix where you want not just the very latest update time.
How often will you need to include the created/updated timestamps in your presentation layer? If the answer is anything more than "once in a great great while", I think you would be better served by having those columns in each table.
On a project I worked on a couple of years ago, we implemented triggers which updated what we called an audit table (it stored basic information about the changes being made, one audit table per table). This included modified date (and last modified).
They were only applied to key tables (not joins or reference data tables).
This removed a lot of the normal frustration of having to account for LastCreated & LastModified fields, but introduced the annoyance of keeping the triggers up to date.
In the end the trigger/audit table design worked well and all we had to remember was to remove and reapply the triggers before ETL(!).
It's for a web based CMS I work on. The creation and last updated dates will be displayed on most pages and there will be lists for the last created (and updated) pages. The admin interface will also use this information.