Introduced in Oracle Database 11g, SecureFiles was designed from the ground up for high performance and scalability. SecureFiles delivers comparable file system-like performance for basic read and write operations. The optimized algorithms with SecureFiles make it up to 10x faster than BasicFiles or old LOBs. The scalability associated with Oracle SecureFiles goes far beyond what is offered in file systems. Organizations can scale-up using large SMP machines or scale-out using Oracle RAC to hundreds of computers while still preserving a single system image. With Oracle Database 12c organizations can store all types of content and scale to store petabytes or exabytes of data.
For more information on SecureFiles performance, refer to this white paper available here .
Also, a test kit to measure SecureFiles performance is available here.
Designed for High Performance
SecureFiles is designed to scale for extremely high ingest rates. In a lab setup consisting of 4 RAC nodes on Dual core 3.4GHz Xeon servers, 3 EMC CX700 storage arrays and 8 concurrent streams, SecureFiles were able to achieve a sustained throughput of 776MB/s for Reads and 462MB/s for writes.
With this configuration consisting of off-the-shelf hardware and software, we can ingest upto 38 TB/day using SecureFiles.
The performance of SecureFiles under both queries and inserts was compared to that of Linux NFS/Ext3 and LOBs. An application inserts a metadata row and a jpeg image. The image is inserted into a SecureFile and as a file in the file system. The test setup consisted of a 2-node RAC environment with 4 concurrent streams.
Fig 1-2: SecureFiles Vs NFS Throughput Comparison
As you can see from Fig 1-2, SecureFile query performance is comparable to Linux NFS/Ext3 file system at all file sizes. Write performance with SecureFiles is better than Linux file system.
In a test comparing SecureFiles and BasicFiles (or older LOBs), SecureFiles outperforms BasicFiles or older LOBs in both the read and write scenarios. An application inserts a metadata row and a jpeg image into either a SecureFile column or a BasicFile column. The test setup consisted of 4 concurrent streams in a single node environment.
Fig 1-3: SecureFiles Vs BasicFiles Throughput Comparison
SecureFiles is optimized for the real world steady-state condition of insert-delete-reclaim scenarios as you can see above in Fig 1-3. SecureFiles does not suffer from the LOB index contention that affects BasicFiles or LOBs. For more information, read the technical whitepaper here.
Oracle Multimedia applications can experience improved performance by using SecureFiles with no change to the application. The test application inserts video data into two tables with one table containing a LOB column using SecureFiles storage and the second table containing a LOB column with BasicFile storage.
Fig 1-4: SecureFiles Vs BasicFiles Comparison using Oracle Multimedia
With SecureFiles, read performance for the sample video using SecureFiles was about 5x when compared to BasicFiles. The application experienced a 2 - 2.5X boost in write performance using SecureFiles.
Oracle Content Database applications can experience improved performance by using SecureFiles with no change to the application. A test application compared the performance of SecureFiles Vs BasicFiles for reading and writing a 1M document using Content DB.
Fig 1-5: SecureFiles Vs BasicFiles Comparison using Oracle Content DB
With no change to the application, SecureFiles outperformed BasicFiles in both reading (2x) and writing (3-4X) using Content DB.