Local Inventory

===============:

Local Inventory has the list of products installed on a ORACLE_HOME.

One Local Inventory per ORACLE_HOME

It is Physically located inside the $ORACLE_HOME/inventory

Local Inventory gets updated, when a patch applied to the $ORACLE_HOME, using OUI.

Files cannot be recovered, if the Local Inventory corrupted or Lost. Only solution
is to reinstall $ORACLE_HOME and re-apply all patches.

Global Inventory
================:

Global Inventory has the list of all oracle products installed on a machine, which
will be in xml format

These products can be various oracle components like database, oracle application
server, collaboration suite, soa suite, forms & reports or discoverer server . This
global Inventory location will be determined by file oraInst.loc

One Inventory per Machine

Location defined in the content of oraInst.loc

It records the physical location of oracle products Installed on a machine. Ex:

$ORACLE_HOME, JRE..
Inventory can be recreated if the Global Inventory corrupted or Lost.

Every $ORACLE_HOME must be registered in Global Inventory

The Global Inventory is pointer to each Local Inventory located

under$ORACLE_HOME/inventory for every ORACLE_HOME

About the Oracle Universal Installer Inventory

The Oracle Universal Installer inventory is the location for the Oracle Universal
Installer�s bookkeeping. The inventory stores information about:

* All Oracle software products installed in all Oracle homes on a machine

* Other non-ORACLE_HOME specific products, such as the Java Runtime Environment
(JRE)

Starting with Oracle Universal Installer 2.1, the information in the Oracle
Universal Installer inventory is stored in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format.
The XML format allows for easier diagnosis of problems and faster loading of data.
Any secure information is not stored directly in the inventory. As a result, during
deinstallation of some products, you may be prompted for required secure
information, such as passwords.
By default, the Universal Installer inventory is located in a series of directories
at /Program Files/Oracle/Inventory on Windows computers and in the /Inventory
directory on UNIX computers.

Local Inventory

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.

Global Inventory

The Global Inventory is the part of the XML inventory that contains the high level
list of all oracle products installed on a machine. There should therefore be only
one per machine. Its location is defined by the content of oraInst.loc.
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.

OUI 2.x (11.5.7 and later):

* Global inventory becomes a list of pointers to each Local Inventory

* Global and local inventories are in text based XML format
* XML conversion is validated and performed if needed by Rapid Clone

Prior to OUI 2.x (11.5.5 and earlier):

* Global inventory was in binary format

* Global inventory contained all software install information
* No local inventories in ORACLE_HOMEs