Audit trail of masterfile changes

[Ravenscroft, Wanda L]

I work on an OpenVMS system.  Our Powerhouse applications are a combination
of RDB Tables and RMS files.  With the RDB Tables we use triggers.  Whenever
a field is updated, we can write to another RDB table before the update and
after the update.  This RDB table is specifically for an audit trail of who
updated what and when they did it.  We don't keep before and after, but it
can be done.  You can do only certain fields or you can do all fields.  It
takes a little bit to set up and organize, but after that, you don't really
have to do alot with it.  The only time you would have to update the
triggers is when you're adding new fields to the database you want to keep
an audit trail of.  This is handled by our Database Administration Group.

RMS files can be done, but if I'm not mistaking, you have to do it within
the programs.  It's alot trickier and I would call it high maintenance.

There are others on this list that have a great deal of knowledge that may
have better ways of handling, but this is just to give you another option.

Wanda Ravenscroft
OpenVMS 6.1-1, Powerhouse 7.10F1
Eveready Battery Company
St. Louis, MO



-----Original Message-----
From: Art, Clifford [mailto:cart@metropolitan.co.za]
Sent: Friday, May 07, 1999 5:11 AM
To: 'POWERH-L@lists.swau.edu'
Subject: Audit trail of masterfile changes


Anyone have a low maintenance method of writing audit trail records to a
file when users update masterfile records.
We want to keep the following info on a file so the users can see it:
user
date
time
masterfile name
masterfile field
changed from
changed to

We currently call a cobol program in the pre-update procedure passing the
masterfile record.
The cobol program reads the original record and compares all the fields one
by one writing 
the audit trail records. It works but is a lot of work to maintain as our
masterfiles are
constantly changing.

The audit file option doesn't seem to help as it only stores an after image
of all the fields changed.
Anyone have a better, preferably low maintenance way of doing this...

PH 7.29.C5 on MPE/iX

Thanks
Clifford Art
cart@metropolitan.co.za

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