Auditing feature for MySQL has been requested by more and more customers. Legal constraints make it mandatory for more and more companies to keep logging information about database access and activity.
It is very important for the MySQL community to have an open source audit plugin available. MariaDB team has always stick to the principle of keeping MySQL 100% open source and has developed the MariaDB Audit Plugin according to these principles. The MariaDB Audit Plugin has been developed using the standard MySQL Audit Plugin API. Being based on standard API makes it run both with MariaDB and with Oracle MySQL Server. The MariaDB Audit Plugin also has some unique features only available for MariaDB.
The purpose of the MariaDB Audit Plugin is to log the server's activity. Who connected to the server, what queries ran and what tables were touched is stored to a rotating log file. The MariaDB Audit Plugin also supports output to the widely used syslogd system. It offers the option to include/exclude users from auditing.
Oracle has released an audit plugin available through its MySQL Enterprise Server version. This make it mandatory to have an active subscription. The version you run is then a fully closed source server under a commercial license. In that case you cannot rely on third party support like SkySQL or Percona.
The MariaDB Audit Plugin is delivered as a very light shared library that can be very easily downloaded and installed on any MariaDB/MySQL server.
Where to download the MariaDB Audit Plugin ?
http://www.skysql.com/downloads/mariadb-audit-plugin-beta
Source Code of the MariaDB Audit Plugin :
https://code.launchpad.net/~maria-captains/maria/5.5-noga-hf
Pointers :
MariaDB Audit Plugin Getting started guide
MariaDB Audit Plugin documentation
My blog post on other auditing techniques
Oracle MySQL Audit Plugin
Oracle MySQL Audit Plugin doc
Macfee Audit Plugin
Macfee Audit Plugin doc
How to Add Policy-based Audit Compliance to your existing MySQL applications 2012-10-30 Rob Young
MySQL Syslog Audit Plugin 2012-10-09 Jonathon Coombes
MySQL Audit plugin. Now documented 2010-04-01 Anders Karlsson
More on the MySQL Audit Plugin interface 2010-03-26 Anders Karlsson
McAfee MySQL Audit Plugin 2012-03-09 Jonathan Levin
#DBHangOps on 1/30/13 o/ 2013-01-29 Geoffrey Anderson
The MySQL Audit plugin API 2010-03-22 Anders Karlsson
More fun with the MySQL Audit Plugin API 2010-03-28 Anders Karlsson
More on the sqlstats SQL Statement monitor plugin 2010-11-30 Anders Karlsson