Re: a quick poll regarding the 11gR2 OFA

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:54 PM, Frits Hoogland <frits.hoogland@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:


>  Anyone know any history of '/u01'? I guess it was used in the past to
> have a second '/usr' on a separate mountpoint, to have a clear place which
> holds the database software. If so, /u02 and further for the datafiles and
> other database files is really bogus.
>

The original paper is available at
http://www.method-r.com/downloads/cat_view/38-papers-and-articles (the
author's current home online) and well worth reading. I'll just quote the
objectives here, and remember what the typical server config was like in
1990, specifically relatively few, directly attached, disks on really rather
expensive hardware.


> Requirement 1. The file system must be
> organized so that it is easy to administer
> growth from: adding data into
> existing databases, adding users, creating
> databases, and adding hardware.
>
>  Requirement 2. It must be possible to distribute
> I/O load across sufficiently
> many disk drives to prevent a performance
> bottleneck.
>
>  Requirement 3. It may be necessary to
> minimize hardware cost.
>
>  Requirement 4. It may be necessary to
> isolate the impact of drive failure across
> as few applications as possible.
>

Some of these objectives are well addressed by SAN technology, LVMs and so
on. I think the idea stacks up pretty well. As far as naming goes, well I
think you can tell a mathematically literate individual who understood
UNIX filesystems of the time wrote it :(


> Name all mount points that will hold sitespecific
> data to match the pattern* /pm* where *p* is a
> string constant chosen not to misrepresent the contents
> of any mount point, and *m* is a unique fixedlength
> key that distinguishes one mount point from
> another


Unfortunately I'm not entirely convinced that current definers of 10 and
11g OFA, are quite so rigorous. :(

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info

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