Clients that connect directly to ASM include

• Oracle Database: Oracle Database is the most fundamental ASM client. It makes requests of ASM relating to numerous types of activities such as ASM File creation.
• ASM Cluster File System: This depends on ASM to provide the ASM volumes.
• ASM Clusterware: If the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR), voting files, or ASM server parameter file (SPFILE) is stored on an ASM disk group, the ASM instance is a client of itself.
• ASMCA: ASM Configuration Manager is a graphical interface that allows you to manage ASM instances, disk groups, and volumes.
• Enterprise Manager: This allows you to manage and monitor the ASM instance directly, and indirectly through the database.
• Clusterware: Clusterware uses ASM to store the OCR and voting disk files by default.
• SQL clients (such as SQL*Plus): A series of ASM-specific SQL commands (such as CREATE DISKGROUP) provide the most fundamental management client for ASM.
• ASMCMD: ASM command-line interface is used to interrogate and manage ASM. It includes many UNIX-like commands that can be used to manage the files and directories in an ASM system.

In addition to clients that connect to ASM directly, there are a series of interfaces provided by Oracle Database that can be used to manipulate ASM in various different ways. These include:

• SQL: When an Oracle Database is managed under ASM, activities that create and delete ASM files (such as CREATE DATABASE and DROP TABLESPACE) will implicitly interact with the underlying ASM instance. A database instance will also directly read and write ASM files as a result of SQL data manipulation language (DML) commands (INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE). However, operations that involve space management (such as extending a data file) will also require interaction with the ASM instance.
• Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN): RMAN is Oracle’s recommended backup and recovery utility. RMAN is well integrated with ASM and can be used to migrate non-ASM databases into ASM.
• XML DB: ASM files and directories can be accessed through a virtual folder in the XML DB repository. XML DB provides a means to access and manipulate the ASM files and directories with programmatic APIs, such as the DBMS_XDB package, and with XML DB protocol services such as FTP and HTTP/WebDAV.
• DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER: The DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER package provides procedures to copy ASM files within a database or to transfer binary files between a local ASM instance and a remote database file. DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER.COPY_FILE supports all transfer combinations involving ASM and/or your local file system, namely:
• Local file system to local file system
• Local file system to ASM
• ASM to local file system
• - ASM to ASM