OFA Standard?

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