Select or create an Oracle installation owner for your installation, depending on the group and user management plan you want to use for your installations.

You must create a software owner for your installation in the following circumstances:

• If an Oracle software owner user does not exist; for example, if this is the first installation of Oracle software on the system.

• If an Oracle software owner user exists, but you want to use a different operating system user, with different group membership, to separate Oracle Grid Infrastructure administrative privileges from Oracle Database administrative privileges.

In Oracle documentation, a user created to own only Oracle Grid Infrastructure software installations is called the Grid user (grid). This user owns both the Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Automatic Storage Management binaries. A user created to own either all Oracle installations, or one or more Oracle database installations, is called the Oracle user (oracle). You can have only one Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation owner, but you can have different Oracle users to own different installations.

Oracle software owners must have the Oracle Inventory group as their primary group, so that each Oracle software installation owner can write to the central inventory (oraInventory), and so that OCR and Oracle Clusterware resource permissions are set correctly. The database software owner must also have the OSDBA group and (if you create them) the OSOPER, OSBACKUPDBA, OSDGDBA, OSRACDBA, and OSKMDBA groups as secondary groups.