Aug 21: 10g Default Installation and OFA

or ... 'what's that all about?!?!'

Last year, I blogged about some of the variations on Optimal Flexible Architecture that I've seen on my travels. I'm gradually coming round to having the service group for clustered applications as the top directory level (e.g.

/myapp1/oradata/
/myapp1/oraindex/
/myapp2/oradata/
/myapp2/oraindex/

but I'm still not convinced. If people ever failed over individual applications then it might prove useful, but I don't see that as a common requirement and it does create lots of mini 'containers' for each application. The up-side of that is that storage is allocated on an application-by-application basis. The down-side is that it's less flexible.

But even if there is an argument for that, I'm still dumb-founded by Oracle's decision to make the default Oracle 10g installation create an admin subdirectory like this

[oracle@ISP4400 ~]$ cd $ORACLE_HOME
[oracle@ISP4400 db_1]$ pwd
/home/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1
[oracle@ISP4400 db_1]$ cd admin
[oracle@ISP4400 admin]$ ls -ltra
total 32
drwxr-x---  57 oracle dba 4096 Apr  2 23:38 ..
drwxr-xr-x   8 oracle dba 4096 Apr 11 21:53 TEST1020
drwxr-xr-x   8 oracle dba 4096 May 22 20:28 RAID1020
drwxr-x---   4 oracle dba 4096 Aug  4 21:38 .

Why on earth would you have admin under $ORACLE_HOME? So that you have to move your site-specific and instance-specific files to different directories every time you perform a software upgrade? Have these people read the OFA documents?

Please, please, someone convince me I'm wrong about this, because it looks like a complete dog's breakfast to me and is so wide of my understanding of OFA that I have to assume I'm missing some crucial reason for this change.

Posted by Doug Burns Comments: (8) Trackbacks: (0)

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#1 - Andy Campbell said:
2006-08-22 09:05 - (Reply)

I've found that if I set $ORACLE_BASE before running OUI then the admin directory gets created in $ORACLE_BASE/admin

So you can get it created in the correct place. Bugged me for ages as well I don't believe you should mix binaries with configs/logs/the database!

Andy

#1.1 - Doug Burns 2006-08-22 09:23 - (Reply)

Cool, thanks!

The thing is that the guide to OFA still talks about seperating admin, but there's definitely a change in the installation from 9i to 10g because you don't need to remember that.

Cheers.

#2 - Frits Hoogland said:
2006-08-22 10:49 - (Reply)

I've found default oracle installations not to be very OFA complaint.

I've given it some thought; please look at: http://frits.homelinux.com/wordpress/?p=11

#2.1 - Doug Burns 2006-08-22 11:33 - (Reply)

Hi Frits,

Nice blog. I don't neccessarily agree with the particular decisions you reached - I'll probably reply properly on your blog. However, I think it's more important that people are thinking it through and making sensible decisions.

I'll need to add your blog to my blog-roll as well. I've built up quite a list and it's starting to need an update.

Cheers,

Doug

#3 - Niall Litchfield said:
2006-08-22 11:12 - (Reply)

I think it fair to say that you aren't the only one thinking that the current 'OFA' as per 10.2 is, er not really very good. Mr Millsap had an interesting take on OFA from the 10g docs on Oracle-l just recently.

http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/08-2006/msg00200.html

#3.1 - Doug Burns 2006-08-22 11:37 - (Reply)

Niall,

I'd actually been thinking about blogging about this for ages, then noticed Cary's comments on Oracle-L and discussed them with him briefly.

I was originally going to include a link to that thread and repeat some of his comments, but thought I'd stick to my own criticism!

Looking at the documentation, it does mention setting ORACLE_BASE and the importance of the admin directory, but I still think they've changed things for the worse.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't a further blog about this later. It's a hobby-horse of mine ;-)

#4 - Neil 2006-08-22 14:52 - (Reply)

I'm of the same opinion as well. Why change? Whilst there is argument for making backup easier, I suggest maybe its more to do with the increase use of RAID and more flexible storage devices than when OFA was first conceived, but the truth is out there.....somewhere

#5 - bennani 2007-11-04 13:57 - (Reply)

bonjour, je cherche des documentation sur ofa en 10g et sur oracle si vous avez en francais svp envoyer les mois merci d'avance


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