About the Oracle Inventory Directory

The Oracle Inventory (oraInventory) directory is the central inventory record of all Oracle software installations on a server. The oraInventory directory contains the following:

• A registry of the Oracle home directories (Oracle grid infrastructure and Oracle Database) on the system

• Installation logs and trace files from installations of Oracle software. These files are also copied to the respective Oracle homes for future reference

The oraInventory directory is created by OUI during installation.By default, the Oracle Inventory directory is not installed under the Oracle Base directory. This is because all Oracle software installations share a common Oracle Inventory, so there is only one Oracle Inventory for all users, whereas each user that performs a software installation can use a separate Oracle base directory.

If you have an existing Oracle Inventory, then ensure that you use the same Oracle Inventory for all Oracle software installations, and ensure that all Oracle software users you intend to use for installation have permissions to write to this directory. To determine if you have an Oracle central inventory directory (oraInventory) on your system:

# more /etc/oraInst.loc

If the oraInst.loc file exists, then the output from this command is similar to the following:

inventory_loc=/u01/app/oracle/oraInventory
inst_group=oinstall

In the previous output example:

• The inventory_loc group shows the location of the Oracle Inventory.

• The inst_group parameter shows the name of the Oracle Inventory group (in this example, oinstall).