spreading my wings -- looking for some recommdations/best practices

Up until now, I have had two 'sets' (each 'set' is a dev, qa, and prod database for a particular app.) of databases in the Unix world, each of which was created by someone else then turned over to me. Each set was configured quite a bit differently than than the other, so looking at each as an example of how to do things leads to several open questions about how to best skin a cat. Now I'm involved in createing a bunch of new db's on Solaris, so I need to firm up my thinking pretty fast.

The question at hand has to do with placement/specification of the archive log files. I know they belong on their own file system, that is not a problem. But what I see in these configurations is that in one case they chose to specify that destination directly in the pfile; in the other case the pfile actually references a symbolic link defined in $ORACLE_BASE/admin/arch, said link pointing to the actual destination, on a dedicated file system. (I've also seen the archivelogs actually placed in $ORACLE_BASE/admin/arch. Even *I* see problems there!) I'm leaning towards having the pfile refer to the link rather than the actual destination. My thinking is that it would give us more flexibility if we decided we needed to relocate the files -- we would just redefine the link and Oracle would never know the difference.

Pros? Cons? Is my inclination leading me down the road to hell?

On a similar note, I've gone back and forth on my thinking about where to place home-grown scripts and utilities ... the two choices being in the oracle user's $HOME/scripts (where $HOME is something like /local/home/oracle) or in $ORACLE_BASE/admin/scripts. I know, some people insist that oracle's $HOME should be at or near $ORACLE_BASE/admin, but that's a different issue . . .

 TIA. Received on Wed Oct 20 2004 - 14:57:22 CDT