An architecture for regulatory compliant database management

Spurred by financial scandals and privacy concerns, governments worldwide have moved to ensure confidence in digital records by regulating their retention and deletion. These requirements have led to a huge market for compliance storage servers, which ensure that data are not shredded or altered before the end of their mandatory retention period. These servers preserve unstructured and semi-structured data at a file-level granularity: email, spreadsheets, reports, instant messages. In this paper, we extend this level of protection to structured data residing in relational databases. We propose a compliant DBMS architecture and two refinements that illustrate the additional security that one can gain with only a slight performance penalty, with almost no modifications to the DBMS kernel. We evaluate our proposed architecture through experiments with TPC-C on a high-performance DBMS, and show that the runtime overhead for transaction processing is approximately 10% in typical configurations.