SoftTree Announces Availability of DB Audit Expert for MySQL Databases

April 19, 2007; 03:35 AM
SoftTree Technologies, a leading provider of management and administration solutions for SQL, today announced its flagship DB Audit Expert software has been enhanced to support MySQL databases. The industry’s first and only multi-platform database auditing solution for Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and now MySQL, the product satisfies the needs of companies large and small. DB Audit Expert enables database and system administrators, security administrators, auditors and operators to track and analyze any database activity including database security, access and usage, data creation, change or deletion. With the addition of MySQL support, DB Audit Expert now empowers users of the world’s most popular open source database with a comprehensive auditing and compliance tool previously available only to users of commercial database platforms.

SoftTree will initially support MySQL version 5.x on Windows and Linux systems. Support for MySQL version 4.x is planned for later this year. “Our customer base has been asking for MySQL support for a long time,” said Bryan Bain, chief marketing officer at SoftTree Technologies. “Our initial feature set represents a huge leap forward for the MySQL community but it will get substantially better over time,” said Bain. DB Audit Expert will enable MySQL administrators to address key database security concerns that include database security and vulnerabilities assessment, database access and user activity auditing, as well as business and regulatory compliance. By year-end, MySQL support will include all of the auditing and compliance functions inherent in DB Audit Expert, including:

• Monitoring of regular and back-door access
• Auditing and continuous compliance
• Centralized auditing control of multiple database systems
• Real-time performance monitoring and diagnostics
• Real-time email alerting
• Regulatory Compliance reporting

DB Audit Expert currently supports auditing of MySQL user-activities and data-changes, including but not limited to logon events, user account changes, object access events, privilege use events, and policy change events. Subsequent releases will provide the full breadth of DB Audit functionality to MySQL users, including analytical reports, data-change auditing, audit log consolidation (central repositories) and policy violation alerting. “Very little progress has been made on the MySQL plan for Simple Data Auditing. We’re committed to filling the void. DB Audit Expert enables the auditing of all user access; including local access on the server as well as access via encrypted and compressed network protocols. Neither of which are technically possible in the competitive network monitoring methods,” said Bain.

The addition of MySQL database support in DB Audit Expert provides users of LAMP-based web applications with a viable tool to proactively manage database security. The majority of LAMP applications use local PHP and Perl scripts to connect web-servers to local MySQL instances, which makes such database access virtually "invisible" to network monitoring tools. DB Audit Expert provides MySQL administrators with visibility into who accessed the database, what they did and when they did it – enabling identify illegal access or malicious data inserts into database tables.

DB Audit Expert provides a cost-effective solution for companies using multiple database systems to meet internal and external audit standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, HIPAA, BASEL II and The USA Patriot Act.

Pricing and Availability

Support for MySQL system level auditing will be available in DB Audit 4.0, scheduled for release in May. A beta version is available immediately. Pricing starts at $495.00 per database instance.

About SoftTree Technologies

SoftTree delivers a power suite of tools for managing and administering the world's most popular database management systems – Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Sybase. DBA-proven, and engineered for the enterprise, SoftTree’s solutions include: Scheduling, Job Management, Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, Configuration Management, Auditing and Compliance, and Data Migration and Transformation. Headquartered in Staten Island, NY, SoftTree’s products are sold and supported directly and via authorized resellers and distributors around the globe. For more information, please visit www.softtree.com.