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Why pgAudit?

Basic statement logging can be provided by the standard logging facility with log_statement = all. This is acceptable for monitoring and other usages but does not provide the level of detail generally required for an audit. It is not enough to have a list of all the operations performed against the database. It must also be possible to find particular statements that are of interest to an auditor. The standard logging facility shows what the user requested, while pgAudit focuses on the details of what happened while the database was satisfying the request.

For example, an auditor may want to verify that a particular table was created inside a documented maintenance window. This might seem like a simple job for grep, but what if you are presented with something like this (intentionally obfuscated) example:

DO $$
BEGIN
    EXECUTE 'CREATE TABLE import' || 'ant_table (id INT)';
END $$;
Standard logging will give you this:
LOG:  statement: DO $$
BEGIN
    EXECUTE 'CREATE TABLE import' || 'ant_table (id INT)';
END $$;
It appears that finding the table of interest may require some knowledge of the code in cases where tables are created dynamically. This is not ideal since it would be preferable to just search on the table name. This is where pgAudit comes in. For the same input, it will produce this output in the log:
AUDIT: SESSION,33,1,FUNCTION,DO,,,"DO $$
BEGIN
    EXECUTE 'CREATE TABLE import' || 'ant_table (id INT)';
END $$;"
AUDIT: SESSION,33,2,DDL,CREATE TABLE,TABLE,public.important_table,CREATE TABLE important_table (id INT)
Not only is the DO block logged, but substatement 2 contains the full text of the CREATE TABLE with the statement type, object type, and full-qualified name to make searches easy.

When logging SELECT and DML statements, pgAudit can be configured to log a separate entry for each relation referenced in a statement. No parsing is required to find all statements that touch a particular table. In fact, the goal is that the statement text is provided primarily for deep forensics and should not be required for an audit.