Migrating to Oracle Database 12c – what to do with auditing?

Originally posted on “Databases at CERN” blog

If you consider migrating to Oracle Database 12c, no matter if you think of development, testing or production environments, one of many decisions you need to take is to define what to do with the auditing. The biggest new feature in this area is so-called Unified Auditing, which captures auditing information from different sources, like for example “normal” and FGA audit records, application contexts, RMAN or DataPump plus few others and stores it in common format and place, which is read-only, partitioned table in AUDSYS schema, by default residing in SYSAUX tablespace and using Oracle SecureFiles feature.