Your single-instance Oracle 12c database home currently supports conventional auditing and uses Automatic Storage Management (ASM). You want to enable unified auditing by executing the command: $…

AUDIT_TRAIL=DB is a conventional auditing initialization parameter and is not a prerequisite for the make relinking command that enables unified auditing.

Setting AUDIT_TRAIL to NONE before relinking is not required; the relinking process handles the auditing mode transition independently of the current AUDIT_TRAIL value.

The Oracle binary must be relinked to switch to unified auditing mode, and you cannot relink an executable that is actively in use by a running database instance; the instance must be shut down first.

Existing fine-grained audit policies do not need to be dropped before relinking; they are preserved and can coexist after unified auditing is enabled.

The Oracle Net listener also references the Oracle binary, so it must be stopped before relinking; attempting to relink while the listener is active can cause errors or leave the listener in an inconsistent state.