A while ago I found an Oracle white paper discussing the performance impact of Oracle database audit (Oracle Database Auditing: Performance Guidelines) It’s pretty obvious that Oracle audit can have an impact on performance. But I’ve never compare different audit trails and audit settings in terms of performance. According to the figures it is recommended to use file-based audit trails for performance critical applications rather than database-based. On the other hand database-based audit trails are easier to query and to analyse.

The test in the white paper have been done with a TPC-C like workload which generates aprox 250 audit records per seconds. Unfortunately it was not clearly stated which audit settings has been used to generate this amount of records. Are just 11g standard audit settings used or as well custom defined object auditing?

According to my experience the performance impact isn’t that critical when just a set of system privilege are audited. On the other hand when enabling object auditing for a bunch of objects can cause a high amount of audit records. Therefor it is quite crucial to have a clear idea what to audit when defining the audit concept and the audit trail.

If time permits, I will try to have a closer look into the performance impact of Oracle database audit.

What kind of experience on the performance impact of database audit did you made? Are you using file based audit trails (OS, XML) rather than database audit trails? What do you audit? Just a few system privilege or also a lot of DML on tables? Any feedback / comment is welcome.