Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1) supports Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1) or older software versions, including Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1).
An Oracle ASM instance must be at Oracle ASM 12c Release 1 (12.1) to support Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1).
See Oracle Exadata documentation for information about the Oracle Database versions that Oracle ASM 12c Release 1 (12.1) supports when Oracle Exadata storage is present.
There are additional compatibility considerations when using disk groups with different releases of Oracle ASM and database instances. For information about disk group compatibility attributes settings, see "Disk Group Compatibility".
When using different software versions, the database instance supports Oracle ASM functionality of the earliest release in use. For example, an Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1) database instance operating with an Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 (11.2) instance supports only Oracle ASM 10g Release 1 (10.1) features.
The V$ASM_CLIENT view contains the SOFTWARE_VERSION and COMPATIBLE_VERSION columns with information about the software version number and instance compatibility level.
The SOFTWARE_VERSION column of V$ASM_CLIENT contains the software version number of the database or Oracle ASM instance for the selected disk group connection.
The COMPATIBLE_VERSION column contains the setting of the COMPATIBLE parameter of the database or Oracle ASM instance for the selected disk group connection.
You can query the V$ASM_CLIENT view on both Oracle ASM and database instances. For an example showing a query on the V$ASM_CLIENT view, see Example 6-4. For more information about the V$ASM_CLIENT and V$ASM_* views, see "Views Containing Oracle ASM Disk Group Information".