the creation date of a database

Question

This is a question that originated from this question by Jamie.

I thought I'll check Dougman's answer. What's happening here? A restore?

select created from dba_users where username = 'SYS';

select min(created) FROM dba_objects;

select created from v$database;

CREATED                   
------------------------- 
10-SEP-08 11:24:44        

MIN(CREATED)              
------------------------- 
10-SEP-08 11:24:28        

CREATED                   
------------------------- 
18-DEC-09 15:49:00      

Created from v$database is more than one year later than creation date of user SYS and SYS' objects.

Answer 1

If you ask for slightly more detail in the first two queries you'll find that the schemas are Oracle's default ones:

SQL> select owner, min(created), max(created)
  2  from dba_objects
  3  where created < (select created from v$database)
  4  group by owner
  5  /

OWNER                          MIN(CREATED)         MAX(CREATED)
------------------------------ -------------------- --------------------
PUBLIC                         15-OCT-2007 10:09:10 15-OCT-2007 11:08:07
OUTLN                          15-OCT-2007 10:09:17 15-OCT-2007 10:11:32
CTXSYS                         15-OCT-2007 10:35:41 15-OCT-2007 10:36:12
SYSTEM                         15-OCT-2007 10:09:22 15-OCT-2007 10:48:40
SCOTT                          15-OCT-2007 11:36:01 15-OCT-2007 11:36:01
XDB                            15-OCT-2007 10:36:34 15-OCT-2007 10:53:50
SYS                            15-OCT-2007 10:09:07 15-OCT-2007 12:01:43
....

21 rows selected.

SQL>

On my database the value for CREATED is before I installed Oracle on my machine. So I think the dates represent when Oracle populated the data dictionary for that version of Oracle.

edit

Yep, it could be the dates in the DCBA templates; certainly my database was built using them.