CREATING YOUR DATABASE

The Optimal Flexible Architecture (OFA) model was designed by Oracle to assist
users in laying out their databases in a way that would support high performance
and ease of maintenance. The Oracle white paper by Cary Millsap entitled “The
OFA Standard” contains the specification in detail. For the purposes of this book,
you will be making use of the characteristics of OFA that identify the logical location
of the Oracle installation and associated files. Note that the Oracle Installer
does not require that Oracle be installed according to OFA specifications and you
will find different Oracle installations at varying levels of OFA compliance at different
sites.


1) Create the admin directory if it does not already exist.
2) Create a directory below admin giving it the name of your database. For
organizational purposes of this book, your database will be referred
to as db00.
Allowing db00 to represent the name of your database, create a directory called
db00 below the admin directory. If you wish to name the database something
other than db00, that is fine.

3) Create the following directories below db00:
• adhoc
• adump
• arch
• bdump
• cdump
• create
• exp
• pfile
• udump


You need to find a location for the physical files that will make up your Oracle
Database. For OFA compliance, Database files are put in directories as
MountPoint/oradata/DatabaseName.
For instance, in UNIX, you might see the following directory structures:
/u01/oradata/db00
/u02/oradata/db00
/u03/oradata/db00