ORA-09925: Unable To Create Audit Trail File

Upon trying to start Oracle database service I got the following ORA-09925 error in $DB_HOME/startup.log file

The same ORA-09925 error when I tried to log on to SQL*Plus.

The ORA-09925 error occurs when:

• Oracle can not find audit directory. 

• Permissions to the audit_file_dest directory for oracle user are incorrect

• The ORA-09925 can also be caused by an out-of-space/exhausted inodes  issue

or

Resolution

1. Check if directory $ORACLE_BASE/admin/$ORACLE_SID/adump exists. If ORACLE_BASE is not set, then the default audit directory is $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/audit

Make sure the permissions on the directory are set to 755.

Also check that:

• AUDIT_FILE_DEST is  writable(chown +w $AUDIT_FILE_DEST) for oracle user
• $ORACLE_BASE/admin/$ORACLE_SID/adump exists and is  writable
• $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/audit is  writable

2. Make sure that there is enough space on the file system to accommodate the newly created audit files:

3.If the inodes are exhausted and cleaning the unwanted files does not help, format the filesystem again with lower bytes per inode to increase the number of inodes for the filesystem.

4.On 11.2.0.3, this error may be seen when ORACLE_PATH environmentatl variable is set.

As a workaround ORACLE_PATH can be unset.It can be fixed by applying Patch 14488943.