Modern enterprise, web, and multimedia applications are generating unstructured content at unforeseen volumes in the form of documents, texts, and media files. Such content is generally associated with relational data such as user names, location tags, and timestamps. Storage of unstructured content in a relational database would guarantee the same robustness, transactional consistency, data integrity, data recoverability and other data management features consolidated across files and relational contents. Although database systems are preferred for relational data management, poor performance of unstructured data storage, limited data transformation functionalities, and lack of interfaces based on filesystem standards may keep more than eighty five percent of non-relational unstructured content out of databases in the coming decades.We introduce Oracle Database Filesystem (DBFS) as a consolidated solution that unifies state-of-the-art network filesystem features with relational database management ones. DBFS is a novel shared-storage network filesystem developed in the RDBMS kernel that allows content management applications to transparently store and organize files using standard filesystem interfaces, in the same database that stores associated relational content. The server component of DBFS is based on Oracle SecureFiles, a novel unstructured data storage engine within the RDBMS that provides filesystem like or better storage performance for files within the database while fully leveraging relational data management features such as transaction atomicity, isolation, read consistency, temporality, and information lifecycle management. We present a preliminary performance evaluation of DBFS that demonstrates more than 10TB/hr throughput of filesystem read and write operations consistently over a period of 12 hours on an Oracle Exadata Database cluster of four server nodes. In terms of file storage, such extreme performance is equivalent to ingestion of more than 2500 million 100KB document files a single day. The set of initial results look very promising for DBFS towards becoming the universal storage solution for both relational and unstructured content.

Digital unstructured data volumes across enterprise, Internet and multimedia applications are predicted to surpass 6.023x10 23 (Avogadro's number) bits a year in the next fifteen years. This poses tremendous scalability challenges for data management solutions in the coming decades. Filesystems seem to be preferred by data management application designers for providing storage solutions for such unstructured data volumes. Oracle SecureFiles is emerging as the database solution to break the performance barrier that has kept unstructured content out of database management systems and to provide advanced filesystem functionality, while letting applications fully leverage the strengths of the RDBMS from transactions to partitioning to rollforward recovery. A set of preliminary performance results was presented at the 34th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2008). It was claimed that SecureFiles would scale maximally as physical storage systems scale up. We legitimize our claims on SecureFiles scalability through this paper, presenting the scalability aspects of SecureFiles through a performance evaluation of I/O bound filesystem like operations on one of the latest high performance cluster of servers and storage. We are presenting benchmark results that we believe represent a world record database insertion rate for any published result - at over 4.4GB/S using a cluster of seven servers. For 100 byte rows, that represents an insertion rate of 45 billion records a second in relational terms. In terms of unstructured data storage, the scale represents an insertion rate of more than 3.7 million 100 MB high-resolution multimedia videos a day.

Over the last decade, the nature of content stored on computer storage systems has evolved from being relational to being semi-structured, i.e., unstructured data accompanied by relational metadata. Average data volumes have increased from a few hundred megabytes to hundreds of terabytes. Simultaneously, data feed rates have also increased with increase in processor, storage and network bandwidths. Data growth trends seem to be following Moore's law and thereby imply an exponential explosion in content volumes and rates in the years to come. The near future poses requirements for data management systems to provide solutions that provide unlimited scalability in execution, availability, recoverability and storage usage of semi-structured content. Traditionally, filesystems have been preferred over database management systems for providing storage solutions for unstructured data, while databases have been the preferred choice to manage relational data. Lack of consolidated semi-structured content management architecture compromises security, availability, recoverability, and manageability among other features. We introduce a system without compromises, the Oracle SecureFiles System, designed to provide highly scalable storage and access execution of unstructured and structured content as first-class objects within the Oracle relational database management system. Oracle SecureFiles breaks the performance barrier that has kept such content out of databases. The architecture provides capability to maximize utilization of storage usage through compression and de-duplication and achieves robustness by preserving transactional atomicity, durability, availability, read-consistent query-ability and security of the database management system.