Oracle: OFA Part 3

Hi,

My name is Franz Devantier, creator of this blog.  I am an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP DBA 11g) Security DBA.

When I started working as an oracle DBA in 2000, it was always time-consuming, gathering the needed information to perform my day-to-day duties. 

I spent many hours, and sat up into the early hours of the night frequently; in order to get all the information together, that I needed.  Eventually after a number of years, I knew most of the issues that could occur, and so the amount of research became minimal.

In this blog, I will give you the details of how to carry out the common tasks, and also the not so common tasks of a Database Administrator.  In this blog, I present information in an easy to understand format; that could potentially save you hundreds of hours in research.

OFA – Optimal Flexible Architecture

(Part 3, Operating System Configuration)

OFA – Notes

Name the home directories using a matching pattern like this:

/AB/h/u

AB = mount point

h    = selection from a finite set of directory names

u    = user or owner of the directory

For example:

Oracle software owner, home directory:

/AB/h/u

Or 

/u02/app/oradev

The applications software directory could be:  

/u02/app/appldev

This means that we can place large home sub-trees, at the same directory level, but on separate mount-points.  This satisfies the first part of OFA Standard 5, by allowing different home directories to be distributed across different mount points.  At the same time we comply with the requirement to have sufficient space on the file systems, or drives.  This means that we can access these two large subdirectories with a single substitution pattern.  For example:  /u02/app/*

To satisfy the second part of OFA standard 5; which states that the contents of an individual home directory, must be able to be distributed across two or more disk drives.

One solution is to use symbolic links, to make directories appear in a single sub-tree; despite the fact that they physically reside on a different mount point.  You can achieve a similar effect in windows, by creating shared directories, and mapping network drives.

To satisfy the standard of preventing performance bottlenecks, system administrators may change the value of “h” in the design  /AB/h/u.  Remember we said that “h” represented a finite selection of directory names like “app” and “home”.

So let’s say that all application users were in the schema “/*/app/*/”, and the normal logon users were in the schema “/*/home/*/”.

For example:

/u01/app/*

/u02/app/*

/u03/app/*

and

/u01/home/*

/u02/home/*

/u03/home/*

Then the system administrator can backup all application level user data using this search string: /*/app/*, and all the logon users data using this search string: /*/home/*.  Does that make sense?

So far we have complied with the following OFA Standards:

1. Sufficient space
2. Performance bottlenecks
3. Minimizing hardware costs
4. Minimizing the impact of disk failure
5. Home directories can be spread across multiple mount points, and the contents of one home directory can be distributed across several mount points.

Franz Devantier,

Need a database health check?

devantierf@gmail.com

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