Prevent delete/update for tables by even superadmin/dba?

There are some mission critical tables which i need to ensure never get deleted or edited. only possible action is to read from it and the dba can add more rows. That's it.

Now for added security i want to prevent even the dba from being able to delete/alter the records, so basically no one can ever delete or alter a record, no super admin also. These tables are critical for activity tracking of certain type of users who's data i need to p开发者_如何学运维reserve indefinitely and some are critical lookup tables. So a mixture of system locked values and user tracked values.

Idea is if someone wants to destroy the data they need to kill that database. Is there a way to do this?

No, not possible, the superuser is always in control of the database. You could REVOKE update and delete permissions, but a superuser can always GRANT these permissions to himself again.

There is no way you can prevent a superuser to do something. The only thing you can do is prevent ANY user from ACCIDENTALLY deleting or updating the records. This can be achieved by creating rule on update and on delete.

CREATE [ OR REPLACE ] RULE name AS ON event  
    TO table [ WHERE condition ]  
    DO [ ALSO | INSTEAD ] { NOTHING | command | ( command ; command ... ) }  

See this link for reference.

For MySQL, the following approach can be taken.

Once you have your application accounts in place, drop the superuser account (really, any account "WITH GRANT OPTION"). The system admin accounts should only have permission to stop and start the system, but not to read from your sensitive table.

Next, alter your table so that it uses the MEMORY engine. This means that the application administrator (not the DBA) will need to restore the contents whenever the database is restarted. It also means that the DBA cannot restart the database with the "skip-grants" option to gain access to the data - because the data will evaporate during the restart. (However, the system's root user can always dump the system memory and find your data in that.)

A better approach is to encrypt your data in the application with a key only known by the application administrator.