Comments on: Tips: Taming the Documentum Audit Trail

By: LEE Chengwei

LEE Chengwei — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:47:17 +0000

Your post is exactly what I’m looking for!

Do you mind sharing with me more on how it was done? Does it helps to speed things up? How much effort does it take? How many tables are involved?

Cheers!

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:07:25 +0000

Yes, and it seem like a good way to both achieve good performance by purging data while at the same time being able to utilize it in a smart(er) way at the same time. However, maybe there are issues with using a BI-platform as a back-up for long-term audit trail data

By: Pie

Pie — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:38:13 +0000

Ah, data mining. I haven’t encountered the magical mix of need and money to get to move the data into a system like that.

Alexandra, you are right. It would be fun to have this all go into a data warehouse or BI platform and dig. We haven’t been doing much analyzing of behavior yet, but I imagine that will come next.

-Pie

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:13:08 +0000

A very interesting post – I will forward it immediately to my database manager who have been learning (and struggling) with optimizations on the database side of our Documentum installation.

I agree that the audit trail is very important and frankly an often underused source of really good information for most installations. I mean we are sitting on a really advanced repository that allows us to create many many perspectives on our pieces of information but we seldom use that to create user or business value. In the audit trail sits all the behavior patterns that could be highly useful for any information-driven organization about what they are really doing with their “information capital”. So it is not usable for just audits and compliance purposes.

I would like to do things like Amazon does and suggest information that could be relevant based on user activity and find other interesting patterns. We have heard that this have been done before where they have taken the audit trail data and pushed it into a Business Objects BI-platform. We have plans in our project to something similar but with SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform instead. The idea is to push a number of aspects of the audit trail into an OLAP cube and then be able to do data mining on that information. Wouldn’t that be cool?