Overview of Inventory

The inventory is a very important part of the Oracle Universal Installer. This is where OUI keeps all information regarding the products installed on a specific machine.

There are two ypes of inventories

1)Global or Central Inventory:- The Global Inventory records the physical location of Oracle products installed on the machine, such as ORACLE_HOMES (RDBMS and IAS) or JRE. It does not have any information about the detail of patches applied to each ORACLE_HOMEs.

The Global Inventory gets updated every time you install or de-install an ORACLE_HOME on the machine, be it through OUI Installer, Rapid Install, or Rapid Clone.

Note: If you need to delete an ORACLE_HOME, you should always do it through the OUI de-installer in order to keep the Global Inventory synchronized.

If  Global Inventory  is lost or corrupted we can regenerate it using runInstaller tool .

There will be only one Global Inventory per machine. Its location is defined by the pointer file

Pointer File:-Pointer File is user to know the location of Global Inventory.Location of pointer file is /etc/oraInst.loc. By looking into the contents of pointer file we can know the  location of global inventory.

2)Local Inventory:- Local inventory contains information of installed softwares which are specific to single ORACLE_HOME.There is one Local Inventory per ORACLE_HOME. It is physically located inside the ORACLE_HOME at $ORACLE_HOME/inventory and contains the detail of the patch level for that ORACLE_HOME.

The Local Inventory gets updated whenever a patch is applied to the ORACLE_HOME, using OUI.

If the Local Inventory becomes corrupt or is lost, this is very difficult to recover, and may result in having to reinstall the ORACLE_HOME and re-apply all patchsets and patches.