Introduction

dbi services MariaDB Optimal Flexible Architecture has been developed according to the Oracle standards. Since Oracle provides clear and robust directory standards these ones can easily be leveraged to other RDBMS engines. dbi services used these standards and extended them to the MariaDB technology.

As for the Oracle Optimal Flexible Architecture, core advantages of OFA are listed below: All servers have the same directory structure, decreasing the maintenance and troubleshooting efforts (and costs) Propose a structure to install MariaDB products but also other kinds of RDBMS (for instance Oracle, Sybase ...) Database security is increased since the critical components are spread out over several physical disks and locations Since all the servers use the same structure, deployment of scripts is easier from a central server

Nowadays due to the evolution of the storage systems we can easily state that the main purpose of the OFA standard is not anymore to improve performances by spreading the database components over the storage infrastructure, but to provide a logical and efficient directory structure, easy to maintain.

Based on OFA, dbi services developed a Database Management Toolkit (DMK) allowing moving easily around the core directories of the oracle products. dbi services also adapted the OFA standards to customers' needs and introduced its large database management experience in this document.

According to its MariaDB database infrastructure management experience, dbi services strongly recommends the usage of the OFA standards, or at least to follow as much as possible the best practices and advices presented in the following pages.