OFA myths was Re: BAARF

I'd like to get rid of the myth that OFA really states all that much about what goes in what tablespace etc. I've got a copy of the Cary's OFA paper entitled "The OFA Standard - Oracle7 for Open Systems" dated Sept 24, 1995. (Happy belated birthday OFA!) At the end of paper there's a summary of the requirements and the recommendations that make up OFA. The CLOSEST the OFA comes to specifying table/index separation are

"#7 Separate groups of segments with different lifespans, I/O request demands, and backup frequencies among different tablespaces."

-or maybe-

"#11 *IF* [emphasis mine] you can afford enough hardware that: 1) You can guarantee that each disk drive will contain database files from exactly one application and 2) You can dedicate sufficiently many drives to each database to ensure that there will be no I/O bottleneck."

The document itself says, "The OFA Standard is a set of configuration guidelines that will give you faster, more reliable Oracle database that require less work to maintain." So every time I read that someone is putting redo here, index tablespaces here, and temp tablespaces there in order to be "OFA compliant" I kinda shrug. Obviously it's all a good idea to separate this stuff but it's not absolutely required for OFA-ness. Essentially, OFA is just a very good way of separating Oracle code from Oracle data to make administration *much* easier. I'm sure before OFA there were plenty of places that had everything under $ORACLE_HOME/dbs and no naming standard for datafiles. Ugh!

Now if we could only find this "Cary V. Millsap, Oracle Corporation" character so he could explain himself. ;-) '95 was a loooooong time ago.

S-

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Thomas Day wrote:

[snip]

> While we're at it could we blow up the OFA myth? Since you're tablespaces
> are on datafiles that are on logical volumns that are on physical devices
> which may contain one or many actual disks, does it really make sense to
> worry (from a performance standpoint) about separating tables and indexes
> into different tablespaces?

[snip]

> Maybe we will never get rid of the OFA myth.
>

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