An Architecture for Regulatory Compliant Database Management

Abstract — 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. I