Security alarms allow you to specify the events to be recorded in the security audit log for individual tables and databases. Using them, you can place triggers on important databases and tables to detect when users attempt to perform access operations that are not normally expected.

Security alarm events are considered successful if the user succeeds in performing the specified type of access. If a particular query triggers a security alarm event, however, it does not necessarily mean that the query completed successfully. It simply means that the security access tests for the specified types of events (for example, select, delete, insert, and update) were passed.

Failure of a security alarm event means that the user attempted to perform the associated operation and failed for some security-related reason. For example, a user can fail to gain access to a table or a database because he or she lacks the required permissions. A query or database operation might fail for other reasons, unrelated to security, but these failures do not trigger the associated security alarm event.

Security alarms can be assigned to specific authorization identifiers (individual users or the public, and groups and roles) so that you can limit monitoring to certain users. You can also specify a database event to be raised when a security alarm is triggered. Database Event Grants Database Event Grants describes the database event permissions required to raise an event.