Audit files in 7.0.13 and up

Just thought I'd pass this info along. I am currently running 7.0.15.4 on both Sun OS 4.1.2 and Sun OS 5.3. I was poking around and discovered a directory called "audit" under $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms. It was filled with files named ora_<process id>.aud.

I called Oracle Support and was told that there are bug reports for both 7.0.13 and 7.1. The bug number for one of them is 177879, I forget which one its for.

Anyway, to make a long story short it seems that even though the default value for audit_trail is false, unless you actually set it to false in the init.ora file the server audits, mostly startups, shutdowns and connect internals if you haven't enabled any other type audits.

There is also a new parameter, audit_file_dest, whose default is ?/rdbms/audit.

What I found is that if you don't want audit files created you must put something like the following in your init.ora:

audit_trace = false
audit_file_dest = /usr/tmp

Unless you set audit_file_dest to something other than the default the server will still create the ora_<process id>.aud files in ?rdbms/audit.

I haven't been able to determine if a new audit file gets created every time an instance is shut down and re-started or if a new on is created for each day. In any case, one of our machines is running 4 different instance and by the time I found the audit files I have accumulated 500 of them!

Did I mention that I can't find any mention of the audit_file_dest parameter anywhere in the documentation?

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| Joe Miklewicz  908-949-3061  jmjm_at_hogpa.att.com |


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