Auditing Oracle Data Mining model usage

In a previous blog post I talked about how you can rename and comment your Oracle Data Mining models. This is to allow you to easily to see and understand the intended use of the data mining model.

Another feature available to you is to audit the usage of the the data mining models. As your data mining environment grows to many 10s or more typically 100s of models, you will need to have some way of tracking their usage. This can allow you to discover what models are frequently being used and those that are not being used in-frequently. You can then use this information to investigate if there are any issues. Or in some companies I've seen an internal charging scheme in place for each time the models are used.

The following outlines the steps required to setup the auditing of your models and how to inspect the usage.

Note: You will need to the AUDIT_ADMIN role to audit the models.

First create an audit policy for the data mining model in a particular schema.

CREATE AUDIT POLICY oaa_odm_audit_usage 
ACTIONS ALL 
ON MINING MODEL dmuser.high_value_churn_clas_svm;

This creates a policy that monitors all activity on the data mining model HIGH_VALUE_CHURN_CLAS_SVM in the DMUSER schema.

Now we need to enable the policy and allow to to tract all activity on the model.

AUDIT POLICY oaa_odm_audit_usage BY oaa_model_user;

This will track all usage of the data mining model by the schema call OAA_MODEL_USER. We can then use the following query to search for the audit records for the OAA_MODEL_USER schema.

SELECT dbusername,
       action_name, 
       systemm_privilege_used, 
       return_code,
       object_schema, 
       object_name, 
       sql_text
FROM  unified_audit_trail
WHERE object_name = 'HIGH_VALUE_CHURN_CLAS_SVM';

But there is a little problem with using what I've just shown you above. The problem is that it will track all activity on the data mining model. Perhaps this isn't what we really want. Perhaps we only want to track only certain activity of the data mining model. Instead of creating the policy using 'ACTIONS ALL', we can list out the actions or operations we want to track. For example, we want to tract when it is used in a SELECT. The following shows how you can set this up for just SELECT.

CREATE AUDIT POLICY oaa_odm_audit_select 
ACTIONS SELECT 
ON MINING MODEL dmuser.high_value_churn_clas_svm;

AUDIT POLICY oaa_odm_audit_select BY oaa_model_user;

The list of individual audit events you can use include:

• AUDIT
• COMMENT
• GRANT
• RENAME
• SELECT

A policy can be setup to tract one or more of these events. For example, if we wanted a policy to track SELECT and GRANT, we would have list each event separated by a comma.

CREATE AUDIT POLICY oaa_odm_audit_select_grant 
ACTIONS SELECT 
ON MINING MODEL dmuser.high_value_churn_clas_svm,
ACTIONS GRANT 
ON MINING MODEL dmuser.high_value_churn_clas_svm,
;

AUDIT POLICY oaa_odm_audit_select_grant BY oaa_model_user;