Introduction

The Oracle Optimal Flexible Architecture (OFA) has been presented in 1991 at the International Oracle User Week in Miami by Oracle Services [Millsap 1993]. Initially this standard has been introduced and developed to improve the Oracle database performances and to decrease the maintenance effort. In summary:

"The OFA Standard is a set of installation guidelines that will give you faster, more reliable, Oracle databases that require less work to maintain" [http://carymillsap.blogspot.com]

The OFA standard evolved in the last years and had to integrate several new components like the Flash Recovery Area, the Automatic Diagnostic Repository, and several new products like Oracle Application Server, Grid Control and of course the Grid infrastructure.

Nowadays due to the evolution of the storage systems we can easily state that the main purpose of the OFA standard is no more to improve the performances by spreading the database components over the storage infrastructure, but it is really to provide a logical and efficient directory structure, easy to maintain.

Based on OFA, dbi services developed a Database Management Toolkit (DMK) allowing to easily moving 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.

Therefore, some recommendations won't match exactly with the strict original OFA document (written in 1995). The purpose of this document is also to provide a clear presentation of the OFA architecture in order to be able to deploy it on any Oracle server infrastructure.

In summary the core advantages of the OFA architecture are listed below:

• All servers have the same directory structure, decreasing the maintenance and troubleshooting efforts (and costs)

• Propose a structure to install Oracle products but also other kind of RDBMS (for instance MySQL)

• 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 the deployment of scripts is easier from a central server

According to its huge Oracle database infrastructure management experience, dbi services strongly advices the usage of the OFA standards, or at least to follow as much best practices as possible.