Trying to capture what reports are being run and by what users

Question

Hi all,
A few months ago, we upgraded to Discoverer 11g. One of the fixes I was hoping for was the updating of the query statistics table to see what reports are being run and who was running them.
The problem is that most users are running Discoverer Plus but they are not "gracefully" closing Discoverer Plus via File -> Exit. They simply hit ths "X" to close the window. Oracle says that when users do this, their statistics are not written to the query statistics tables. I am finding that the EUL workbooks that we have installed are pretty useless due to this and really the only reason I have left the query statistics logging to be enabled. I am now seriously considering disabling this as it is very inconsistent (we do trim the query statistics table on a rolling 180 days of history via concurrent program that deletes stats older than 180 days).
I am wondering if anyone here has done any logging of what workbooks are being run through some trigger? I see there is a EUL trigger function that we have in place, called post save documents, it records the workbook name, sql, etc. But it does not record the date that it was run. Has anyone modified this trigger so that every time a report is run it logs the report, sql, user and when it was being run to the table?
I have an Oracle SR open, I've asked this in a couple different ways but they keep coming back to a canned answer of "if the user does not do File -> Exit, it will not log their session to the statistics table... blah blah blah".
I hope I am making sense in what I am asking for.
Thank you.
Regards,
Jerry

Answer 1

Hi,
I have never found the Discoverer stats to be very useful for some of the reasons you have given.
I don't see that an EUL trigger will do what you want as unfortunately there is no open document trigger. So to get any information you have to rely on the user saving the workbook.
One option you could explore is to use a DBMS_FGA (fine grained access) policy to audit some of the Discoverer query statements. For example, you can add a FGA policy to the EUL5_DOCUMENTS table that records all SELECTs on the table. That will show you which users are opening the workbooks you have in the EUL. Or you could add a policy to the views/tables used in the Discoverer workbooks and then audit the selects with an audit condition to audit only Discoverer sessions.
How you do it depends on exactly what you want to audit.
Rod West