Oracle: OFA (Optimal Flexible Architecture) Part 1

Dear Readers,

My name is Franz Devantier, creator of this blog.  I am an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP DBA 11g) Security DBA.  I will be sharing with you the basic duties of an Oracle DBA, and also some of the undocumented, and not so well known tasks. 

OFA – Optimal Flexible Architecture

(Part 1, Operating System Configuration)

The OFA Standard is a set of configuration guidelines that will give you faster, more reliable Oracle databases that require less work to maintain.  The “Optimal Flexible Architecture’’ described in the OFA Standard is built into the Oracle configuration tools and documentation on all open systems ports.  If a system is set up using OFA, then you will understand the layout, regardless of which configuration is used.  You will for example, immediately know where the alert log is, and the network configuration files etc, without having to search through the directories for the files.  If you have ever worked on a site, where the OFA standard was not implemented, then you would have found that you needed to do a lot of extra work, just to find where the various components of the Oracle implementation were.

Without OFA, these are the issues that you can expect: 

• Routine administrative tasks like software and data backup are performed incorrectly or inefficiently, which could result in severe database and business losses.
• Having multiple databases on one physical server can be a nightmare, and even result in corruption of production data.
• Difficulty in administering database segment growth can result in repeated application failure, until you get the configuration into a workable condition.
• Sub-Optimal database performance.

Therefore an entire suite of problems can be avoided by applying tried and tested knowledge of how to optimize Oracle’s relationship with its host operating system.  Oracle does most of this automatically for you, from Oracle 7 onwards, with the configuration and installation tools.  However you still have the opportunity to over-ride this set of best practices, if you are required to do so.

If you are installing an Oracle Database, then you are probably going to want to install the maximum sized database and application that your specific computer can handle. 

If you are only intending to use a fraction of your computer resources for the database, then you should consider “Oracle VM”.   With Oracle VM, you can make optimal use of your existing architecture.  That is to say, instead of buying additional hardware, you can virtualize your existing architecture.  This way you can optimize the use of your current hardware.

Before you can install the Oracle database, you must connect and configure the peripheral  devises on the computer.  You must configure disk swap space, as well as your file systems or directories that you are going to use.  Plan your data storage space, and get your network up and running.  Check the installation manual, for the specific operating system.  Make sure you have implemented all the pre-requisites before you start installing Oracle on the Computer.  Windows typically has few pre-requisites, whereas, Unix/Linux may have substantial pre-requites.  So I will probably focus more on Unix than Windows.

Mount Points

You need to create names and potential sizes for your file system mount points.  In Windows, you would look at your drives, and decide on which drive to place which component.  You need to decide where to put your applications, data, Oracle executables, archive log files, and control files, amongst other things.

1. Standard 1 - Sufficient Space:  There must be sufficient space on the file-system’s or disk drives, for projected database growth.  You must determine, how the configuration will be affected, if you add additional hardware like disk drives.
2. Standard 2 - Performance Bottlenecks:  The aim is to minimize performance bottlenecks.  To do this you need to be able to distribute the I/O load over as many physical disk drives as possible.  If you are using a SAN, or ASM(Automatic Storage Management), RAID devices, or volume managers, then your level of control over this will be limited.
3. Standard 3 - Minimize Hardware Costs:  You can minimize hardware costs, by right-sizing you hardware devices, or if you already have available hardware, you can consider virtualization.  Oracle VM, in my opinion is the best way to go.  Oracle VM is basically improved and re-packaged XEN hypervisor, VM’s, and Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris for the Operating system.  Another popular choice for virtualization is ESX hypervisor.  Personally I would not implement the windows HyperV, as a virtual platform, at this point in time.  However as the new products come out, it would be good to keep re-evaluating them.
4. Standard 4 - Minimize the impact of Disk Failure:  You should have redo log files, and control files, duplexed on separate file systems or physical disk drives.  Keeping your backups on different physical devices to your live data-files is essential. 

Balance the cost of having performance bottlenecks, against the cost of minimizing the hardware costs. 

Franz Devantier,

Need a database health check?

devantierf@gmail.com

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