Traditional auditing is the pre-12c audit model: AUDIT and NOAUDIT statements, the AUDIT_TRAIL initialization parameter, records written to the SYS.AUD$ and FGA_LOG$ tables or to operating-system and XML files, and fine-grained audit policies managed through DBMS_FGA. Unified auditing, introduced in 12.1, replaced all of this with policy objects and a single audit trail.

Migrations care because audit configuration is usually compliance-driven and must be reproduced on the target. Knowing which statements, privileges and objects were audited, what conditions fine-grained policies applied, and where the records were written is needed to configure Azure SQL Auditing or the pgAudit extension. Databases running in mixed mode, with both traditional and unified auditing active, are harder to inventory.

Oracle's 21c Upgrade Guide declares traditional auditing deprecated (notice dated May 2021) and recommends unified auditing. The 26ai Upgrade Guide lists it as desupported (notice dated April 2023). The same 26ai page deprecates the PL/SQL cleanup helpers tied to the old trail and removes the FLUSH_UNIFIED_AUDIT_TRAIL procedure because unified records are now written directly to their table.

Traditional (pre-Unified) Auditing, born before 11.2, recorded Oracle activity involving objects, privileges, and sessions. It distinguished success from failure and offered BY ACCESS or BY SESSION reporting.

Deprecated in 21c and desupported in 26ai, it leaves Oracle users with Unified Auditing. Its Azure heirs cannot fully match it: capture may be best-effort, and pgAudit cannot reliably audit superusers or reproduce mandatory SYSDBA auditing.

It is survived by Azure SQL Auditing, which lives on partly, and the pgAudit extension on PostgreSQL Flexible Server, which also lives on partly. Both require medium effort, a suitably restrained inheritance for a feature devoted to keeping records.