Unified Auditing – is it ON or OFF in Oracle 12c?

Don’t trust our slides – only believe what you’ve verified by yourself 😉

Actually one of our slides gives a parameter recommendation to set AUDIT_TRAIL since Oracle 11g explicitly to the value you want as otherwise it may switch to “DB” and you may not be aware of it. In conjunction with this setting we explain the new Oracle Database 12c feature Unified Auditing – which is not linked into the kernel and therefore should be off.

Should be … well … thanks to Marco Patzwahl who asked me why he still has over 100 audit records in V$UNIFIED_AUDIT_TRAIL? Good question – and I’ve had no answer. But Carol, my manager, knew the right person to ask. And Naveen replied within minutes (thanks!!!).

Here are the facts:

• Unified Auditing is not linked into the Oracle 12c kernel by default to offer people the choice to use it and to avoid conflicts in case somebody has auditing ON already – so neither during an upgrade nor with a fresh 12c database you’ll see it included into the kernel. It will have to be linked in manually (see our slides)
  • Check if Unified Auditing is present in your environment:
    SQL> select VALUE from V$OPTION where
    PARAMETER=’Unified Auditing’;
  • In case you’ll link it into the kernel
    cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
    make -f ins_rdbms.mk uniaud_on ioracle
    ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME
    make sure you set AUDIT_TRAIL=NONE afterwards as otherwise both auditing mechanisms will run concurrently
• But even though it is not linked into the kernel a bit of Unified Auditing is ON by default in MIXED MODE when you create a fresh Oracle 12c database.
  • MIXED MODE auditing?
    • See the documentation for further information
    • Just two policies are enabled by default: ORA_SECURECONFIG and ORA_LOGON_FAILURES
• Turn Unfiied Auditing OFF?
  • If is has been linked in into the kernel, unlink it:
    cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
    make -f ins_rdbms.mk uniaud_off ioracle ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME
  • Disable the two default policies – this will turn off any Unified Auditing features:
    SQL> noaudit policy ORA_SECURECONFIG;
    Noaudit succeeded.
    SQL> noaudit policy ORA_LOGON_FAILURES;
    Noaudit succeeded.

Update – 4-MAR-2016 – thanks to Marco Patzwahl, MuniQsoft:

1. If parameter audit_trail=NONE and select VALUE from V$OPTION where PARAMETER=’Unified Auditing’ == FALSE then no Unified Audit Trail will be written
2. If select VALUE from V$OPTION where PARAMETER=’Unified Auditing’ == TRUE then the parameter audit_trail has no meaning anymore

–Mike