A user left a comment in the Utilities Guide:

I want to exclude the audit trail from a Data Pump export, but I can’t find a specific example.

First, thanks to the user for leaving a comment. We read every one of them and use them to improve the documentation.

Let me show you how to exclude the audit trail from your Data Pump export.

Exclude Audit Trail You can exclude the audit during export and import using the exclude parameter.

expdp … full=y exclude=audit_trails Data Pump includes the audit trail only in full exports. Data Pump excludes all kinds of audit trail, including traditional, unified, and fine-grained. It’s not possible to exclude just one audit trail while keeping the others. It’s all or nothing. I recommend using the exclude on the export command, if possible. Don’t try to exclude the underlying parts of the audit trails (such as the AUDSYS schema or the AUD$ table). What About The Policies Data Pump handles audit policies differently, and they might be included in schema and table exports.

To exclude traditional audit policies: expdp … exclude=audit To exclude unified audit policies: expdp … exclude=audit_policy How Did I Know That? The exclude parameter is very powerful, and there’s no room in the documentation to list all the different options you can exclude.

But the database can tell you exactly what you can exclude. Here’s a list of the audit-related object paths that you can exclude in a full export:

SQL> select object_path, comments from database_export_objects where upper(comments) like ‘%AUD%’;

OBJECT_PATH COMMENTS

---

AUDIT Audits of SQL statements AUDIT_CONTEXT Audit Namespace Context AUDIT_DEFAULT Procedural system privilege audits AUDIT_OBJ Object audits on the selected tables AUDIT_POLICY Audit Policy AUDIT_POLICY_ENABLE Audit Policy Enable AUDIT_TRAILS Database Audit Trails and their configuration

(output truncated)

75 rows selected. For schema and table exports, check schema_export_objects and table_export_objects, respectively.

Additional Notes Remember, traditional auditing is deprecated in Oracle AI Database 26ai. It’s time to start using Unified Auditing. Check out the syntax converter script in Traditional to Unified Audit Syntax Converter – Generate Unified Audit Policies from Current Traditional Audit Configuration (Doc ID 2909718.1). The audit trail is important information. If you exclude the audit trail during a database migration, I recommend archiving it beforehand. You don’t want to lose your audit information. Happy exporting!