The OFA (Optimal Flexible Architecture) architecture was created by
Carry Milsap from ORACLE Corporation. The seminal article was publishe
in the "Oracle Magazine" a few years back. There are various articles of
Mr. Milsap's on OFA on different Web sites. Your best bet is to do a
search on "Carry Milsap" (I am pretty sure I spelled his name correctly,
but you may want to try similar spellings if this one does not pan out).
Hope this helps.
Michael Serbanescu
Michael Peck wrote:
>
> I work for a company that produces software that uses Oracle as the back
> end. Because of this, we are a VAR for 7.3 on Solaris and HP-UX.
>
> I'm working on the installer that we ship, and I want it to look at the
> Oracle that's installed before attempting to upgrade the binaries.
>
> A DBA told me that the way we structure Oracle is following a standard
> that Oracle came up with called OFA, which stands for (I think) Oracle
> Flexible Architecture. It was explained to me that this allows for
> having several instances running from the same oracle_base, and several
> versions of the binaries running those instances. The directory tree
> looks something like this:
>
> /opt/oracle_base
> /opt/oracle_base/admin
> /opt/oracle_base/admin/<SID>
> /opt/oracle_base/admin/<SID>/create (where the db create scripts are)
> /opt/oracle_base/admin/<SID>/pfile (where the init.ora really is)
> /opt/oracle_base/admin/<SID>/?dump (bdump, udump, cdump)
> /opt/oracle_base/product
> /opt/oracle_base/product/7.1.6 (7.1.6 binaries)
> /opt/oracle_base/product/7.1.6/* (rdbms, dbs, bin, etc)
> /opt/oracle_base/product/7.1.6/dbs/init<SID>.ora (link to
> /opt/oracle_base/admin/<SID>/pfile/init<SID>.ora)
> /opt/oracle_base/product/7.3.2
> /opt/oracle_base/product/7.3.2/* (rdbms,dbs,bin,etc)
> /opt/oracle (link to /opt/oracle_base/product/7.1.6)
> /opt/oracle2 (link to /opt/oracle_base/product/7.3.2)
>
> and so on.
>
> For an instance that is version 7.1.6, ORACLE_HOME would be /opt/oracle,
> for an instance that is version 7.3.2, ORACLE_HOME would be
> /opt/oracle2.
>
> I hope somebody understands this, as it's the only way I've ever seen
> Oracle installed.
>
> My problem, is that I'm going to have my code do some looking to see if
> the current installation follows this guideline, and if not, tell the
> user to fix it. I really want to be able to tell them where to look to
> find out what being OFA compliant means, but I can't find it anywhere on
> Oracle's mostly-broken web site, www.oracle.com (most searches don't
> work, or are missing the header & footer, broken images, etc. Pretty
> shoddy from what I've seen.)
>
> Will (can) someone please tell me where I can find out about this? I'll
> take a URL, a volume and page number or whatever, I just need some
> reference that explains stuff. (partly to tell the user, partly to make
> sure I'm not violating it;)
>
> Thanks in advance! If someone would rather email me than post the
> answer, I'm mpeck_at_connectinc.com.
>
> Mike Peck
Received on Tue Jul 15 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT
