Data engineering·Governance, privacy and meaning
somebody asks who read the salary table last March and you can answer with a query rather than with a guess.
Audit trail
Also calledaccess log, query history audit
The retained record of who accessed or changed what, and when. In a warehouse it is unusually cheap to have, because the query history exists anyway, and unusually valuable during an incident or an investigation. It also doubles as the input to deprecation decisions and cost attribution, which is generally what gets it turned on before any regulator asks.