How to Resolve ORA-15173: entry 'pdbseed' does not exist in directory

There're two operations that you might see ORA-15173.

1. Creating a Multitenant Database
2. Creating a Pluggable Database

ORA-15173 in DBCA

Saw errors when creating a 19c RAC database by DBCA like the following.

Of course, the whole database creation failed.

Rationale

This is because we choose NOT to use Oracle-Managed File (OMF) for the RAC database, RMAN cannot find the existing directory to restore data files. (Is it a bug?)

Solutions

You can either choose to use OMF during database creation, or using asmcmd mkdir to create necessary directories by grid in advance. For example:

The format of directory is:

As you can see, we created a folder named PDBSEED for PDB$SEED, the template of pluggable databases.

There's a successful example of creating a 19c RAC database by DBCA without using OMF.

ORA-15173 in Creating PDB

Tried to clone a remote PDB to local, but it failed with ORA-15173:

The error message clearly showed that it can not find the local folder to store data files from the remote PDB.

Usually, creating a new directory for the new PDB won't be a problem for single-instance databases, but for ASM that stores non-OMF (Oracle-Managed Files) data files, it's a problem.

Solution

To solve ORA-15173, you have to create the directory in advance and manually.

Now we can try to clone the PDB again.