Comments on: Oracle 11g Secure File Features with Oracle UCM

By: Oracle

Oracle — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:42:51 +0000

Secure files is faster because it feature a new write-gather cache that buffers data up during writes before flushing or committing to the underlying storage layer. This buffering allows for large contiguous space allocation for LOB or “secure file” data and reduces write latency. By reduceing disk seek costs, both read performance and write performance are greatly improved.

By: bex

bex — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:31:03 +0000

@JRS:

I chatted about this a bit on my blog…

Static files that are *local* to the web server are fastest. Going to the database is an extra network round trip that doesn’t make sense for small files.

However… if you have so many small files that you have to keep them on a network file system, then Oracle 11g with secure files could be much faster.

Or… if you are service up HUGE images over the web, then storing then in the database makes lots of sense.

Oracle UCM lets you do a blended approach: keep small web files on the local system, and large files in the database… with some tweaking of course

By: JRS

JRS — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:17:43 +0000

hey Bex,
I`m still a bit confused. If Oracle 11g is supposed to be faster than a linux file system, then how is the filesystem faster at providing webcontent?

I haven`t had any experience with the Oracle DB. But in the past working on MSSQL DB content driven sites that recieve a large ammount of hits, it was found to be far better to export static data to xml on the file system and load in the xml data instead of hitting the database for each user that visited the site.

Site studio does a similar thing where it generates a static html page so it doesn`t have to abuse the DB.

I think I`ll need a lot of convincing a good explanation and time to test out performance of 11g

If webcontent assets were to be stored on the DB, is it possible to cache the images or would the DB be called for every asset?

I can see the benefits of using 11g, but it just scares me.. Is it possible to install 11g across multiple servers and split data across them? EG server 1 holds 1-1000 content items. Server 2 holds 1001-2000 content items and do a global query across both servers?

Thnx.

By: Marco Gralike

Marco Gralike — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:28:21 +0000

A database kind of approach will be the way to go. It has some big advantages as also Windows acknowledged with WinFS (but couldn’t get it in on time yet… http://www.liberidu.com/blog/?p=120).

Some of the advantages:
- data integrity
- solving locking problems
- search abilities build within
- handling enourmous amounts of small data as has been demonstrated the last thirty years
- out of the box live/hot backup and recovery solutions (that can handle data integrity issues)

…and by the way, “a database structure” can exist not only on solid disks…

By: bex

bex — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:34:38 +0000

one caveat… for web content — especially small images — the filesystem is still faster. So a split approach is optimal.

Luckily you can do that with a FileStoreProvider…

By: David Roe

David Roe — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:40:06 +0000

I agree that quite a bit more testing needs to be done. UCM performs very, very well now with massive amounts of content on the filesystem. Obviously the jury is out on whether the DB can handle the same in a live environment, though I think this is the direction they will ultimately take the product.

By: JRS

JRS — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:16:45 +0000

It all sounds great, but I think I`ll need more convincing before I start storing assets into a DB…

I haven`t had any experience with the Oracle DB.. But using it as a vault that could store TBs worth of data scares me..