OFA Standards (Oracle Magazine November/December 1995)

OFA Rule 1. Name all mount points that will hold site-specific data to match the pattern /pm, where p is a string constant that will not misrepresent the contents of any mount point, and m is a unique fixed length key that distinguishes one mount point from another.

OFA Rule 2. Name home directories matching the pattern /pm/h/u, where pm is a mount point name, h is selected from a small set of standard directory names, and u is the name of the owner of the directory.

OFA Rule 3. Refer to explicit path names only in files designed specifically to store them, such as the UNIX /etc/passwd file and the Oracle oratab file; refer to group memberships only in /etc/group.

OFA Rule 4. Store each version of Oracle Server distribution software in a directory that matches the pattern h/product/v, where h is the login home directory of the Oracle software owner and v represents the version of the software.

OFA Rule 5. For each database with db_name=d, store database-administration files in the following subdirectories of h/admin/d, where h is the Oracle software owner's login home directory.

OFA Rule 6. Name Oracle database files using the following patterns-.

where pm is a mount-point name, q is a string denoting the separation of Oracle data from all other files, d is the db_name of the database, t is an Oracle tablespace name and n is a distinguishing key that is fixed-length for a given file type. Never store any file other than a control, redo log, or data file associated with database d in /pm/q/d.

OFA Rule 7. Separate groups of segments with different life spans, I/O request demands, and backup frequencies among different tablespaces. For each Oracle database, create the following special tablespaces in addition to those needed for applications segments:

SYSTEM data dictionary segments only

TEMP temporary segments only

RBS rollback segments only

TOOLS general-purpose tools only

USERS miscellaneous user segments

OFA Rule 8. Name tablespaces connotatively with eight or fewer characters.

OFA Rule 9. Choose a small set of standard sizes for all character-special files that you might use to store Oracle database files.

OFA Rule 10. If you are using Oracle Parallel Server, select exactly one node N to act as Oracle administrative home for the cluster to house the administrative subtree defined in OFA Rule 5. Let h be the Oracle software owner's login home directory on node N. Create a directory named for each instance accessing database d within the adump, bdump, cdump, logbook, pfile, and udump directories of N:h/admin/d. On every node n in the cluster except N, mount the remote directory N:h/admin/d as the administrative directory for database d (for example, as n:h/admin/d.

OFA Rule 11. If you can afford enough hardware to guarantee that each disk drive will contain database files from exactly one application and you can dedicate a sufficient number of drives to each database to ensure there will be no I/O bottleneck, name mount points matching the pattern /qdm, where q is a string denoting that Oracle data and nothing else is to be stored there, d is the value of the db_name init.ora parameter for the single database that will be stored there, and m is a unique fixed-length key that distinguishes one mount point for a given database from another.

SUMMARY

Using these guidelines, you should be able to build a high-performance system that requires little maintenance, even in continually changing conditions.