Comparison
Audit trailvsData classification
Audit trail
somebody asks who read the salary table last March and you can answer with a query rather than with a guess.
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.
Full entry →Data classification
every column is tagged as public, internal or restricted, and the access rules are generated from the tags rather than written per table.
Labelling data by sensitivity so that policies can be applied by label rather than table by table. It is what makes governance scale past a few dozen tables, because a rule expressed over a tag automatically covers next month's new table. Its weak point is coverage: an untagged column defaults to whatever the platform's default is, so the default has to be the restrictive one.
Full entry →