ORACLE SECUREILES
A Filesystem Architecture in Oracle Database Server
Niloy Mukherjee, Amit Ganesh, Krishna Kuchithapadam and Sujatha Muthulingam
Oracle SecureFiles Team, Oracle Corporation, 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, U.S.A.
Keywords: Oracle SecureFiles, Filesystems, Database Management Systems, Performance, Storage Utilization,
Consistency, and Durability.
Abstract: 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. We introduce Oracle SecureFiles System, a storage architecture 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 been keeping unstructured content out of databases. The architecture provides capability to
maximize utilization of storage usage through compression and deduplication and preserves data
management robustness through Oracle database server features such as transactional atomicity, durability,
availability, read-consistent query-ability and security of the database management system.
1 INTRODUCTION
Traditionally, database management systems have
been designed to provide maximum throughput of
storage and access to relational data in transaction
processing and data warehouse environments.
However, the rapid growth of Internet has caused a
huge increase in the amount of semi-structured
information generated and shared by organizations
in almost every industry and sector. As data volumes
and ingestion rates step up, a number of challenges
have risen in the area of database management
(Blumberg, 2003) include provision for maximum
throughput of storage and access operations,
scalability, utilization of storage usage, highest
degree of availability and security of critical data,
and information lifecycle management (Hobbs,
2007) data volumes.
Filesystems have been preferred over database
management systems for providing storage solutions
for unstructured data while databases have been
preferred to manage accompanying relational data
for indexing and querying purposes. While
filesystems provide better throughput of storage and
access operations, they lack secure data management
features such as atomicity, consistency, durability,
manageability and availability (Vijayan, 2006)
We present Oracle SecureFiles System, a
consolidated data storage architecture within Oracle
11g database server (Oracle, 2008) that bridges the
gap between unstructured and relation data
management by providing a clustered filesystem-like
or better throughput and scalability for unstructured
content while preserving the same for relational
content. Consolidated content management as first-
class database objects within the Oracle database
kernel provides the advantages of rich database
features such as transaction consistency, durability,
metadata indexing, and query-ability using SQL
standards. Besides providing support for advanced
database features, Oracle SecureFiles provides
advanced filesystem features such as compression
and deduplication (Biggar, 2007) for optimising
storage usage as well as encryption for maximum
content security.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The
design of the SecureFiles architecture and
components is detailed in section 2. The following
section details the set of database features associated
with SecureFiles. A section on conclusion follows
60
Mukherjee N., Ganesh A., Kuchithapadam K. and Muthulingam S. (2008).
ORACLE SECUREILES - A Filesystem Architecture in Oracle Database Server.
In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - SE/GSDCA/MUSE, pages 60-63
DOI: 10.5220/0001885700600063
Copyright
c
SciTePress
Section 4, which presents description of in-house
throughput experiments conducted on SecureFiles
and their evaluations.
2 DESIGN
The design of SecureFiles consists of two major
components, namely, the schema or the structural
component and the architectural component. The
rest of the section will describe each of these
components in details.
2.1 Schema
The structural design of SecureFiles is similar to that
of filesystems.
Unstructured data associated with semi-
structured content is stored as SecureFile objects. A
SecureFile object is a collection of variable sized
pages or chunks allocated from and stored in the
Oracle database using the Oracle SecureFiles. Each
chunk is a set of contiguous database blocks. The
base table is an Oracle table that stores relational
metadata associated with SecureFile objects. Besides
the columns containing relational metadata, the table
consists of one or more columns that hold locators
providing reference pointers to the associated
SecureFile objects. Each row-column intersection
provides a distinct pointer to the very first block of
an individual SecureFile object. Users can create
unique and secondary indexes on the relational
columns in the base table.
2.2 Architecture
SecureFiles architecture is layered into six major
components, namely, Write Gather Cache,
Transformation Management, Inode Management,
Space Management and the I/O Management.
2.2.1 Write Gather Cache
SecureFiles uses a new cache that buffers data up to
64MB during write operations before flushing or
committing to the underlying storage layer. This
buffering of in-flight data allows for large
contiguous space allocation and large disk I/O.
Write performance is greatly improved due to
reduced disk seek costs. The write gather cache is
allocated from the database buffer cache and
maintained on a per-transaction basis.
Figure 1: Architecture of SecureFiles.
2.2.2 Transformation Management
The advanced data transformation management
comprises of three subcomponents, compression,
encryption and de-duplication. Oracle SecureFiles
provide the option to enable/disable all possible
combinations of these features.
De-duplication: For every SecureFile object that
has de-duplication enabled, a secure hash is
generated for a subset of the object (prefix hash) and
also for the whole object (full hash). During
streaming writes, once generated, the prefix hash is
compared to a set of prefix hashes stored in an
index. If there is a prefix match, then the SecureFile
object associated with the original prefix hash
(master version) is read and byte-by-byte
comparison is performed across the buffered data
and the master version
Compression: Compression is performed on
write gather cache buffers when sufficient amount of
data is buffered. SecureFiles compression allows for
random reads and writes to SecureFile data. Oracle
SecureFiles architecture provides varying degrees of
compression that represent a trade-off between
storage savings and CPU costs.
Encryption: Oracle SecureFiles uses Transparent
Data Encryption (TDE) syntax for encryption of
SecureFile objects along with the accompanying
relational metadata.
2.2.3 Inode Management
The inode management layer is responsible for
initiating on-disk storage and access operations on
SecureFile object buffers being communicated by
the upper layers in the SecureFiles architecture. As a
client of the space management layer, the inode
ORACLE SECUREILES - A Filesystem Architecture in Oracle Database Server
61
manager requests on-disk free space to store the
amount of data being flushed by the write gather
cache. Based on the array of chunks returned by the
space management layer, the inode manager stores
the metadata either in the row-column intersection of
the base table associated with the object, or in the
most current header block of the SecureFile object.
The metadata information includes start block
address and length of a chunk as well as the start and
end offsets of the object being mapped to mana the
chunk. The metadata structures are transactional
managed similar to relational data and are
recoverable after process, session and instance
failures.
2.2.4 Space Management
The space management layer supports allocation of
sets of variable sized contiguous data blocks or
chunks up to 64M for on-disk storage of SecureFile
objects. With SecureFile objects being cached in the
Write Gather Cache, the space management layer is
able to meet larger space requests from the inode
manager through more contiguous layout on disk,
therefore providing more efficient read and write
access. Although space metadata is managed in-
memory, the metadata changes are consistent across
transactions, instance failures as well as media
failiures
Operations such as full overwrites / rewrites,
updates and deletes in SecureFiles follow ‘copy-on-
write’ semantics resulting in de-allocation of space
previously occupied by the offsets affected by the
operation. Space freed during the de-allocation
operations is not reused until it is retained for a
certain period of time to achieve read consistency
correctness for qureies.
2.2.5 I/O Management
During writes, the Inode Manager communicates the
set of chunks obtained from the space layer as well
as the write gather cache buffers to the I/O Manager.
Based on a user parameter, the I/O Manager either
copies the write gather cache buffers to database
cache buffers or schedules asynchronous disk writes
for the set of chunks.
The I/O Manager supports read-ahead or pre-
fetching data from disk. It keeps track of access
patterns of SecureFile objects and issues intelligent
pre-fetching of chunks before the request is actually
made. Read latency is reduced by overlapping the
network and storage throughput.
3 FEATURES
Being stored as first-class objects within the
database, Oracle SecureFiles has been designed to
inherit most of the data management features such as
transaction support, read consistency and data
durability provided by the Oracle database server
that are not provided by traditional filesystems.
3.1 Transactions and Read Consistency
Oracle SecureFiles is a transactional data store.
Operations of Oracle SecureFiles generate undo
records for relational data as well as metadata
operations in the delta update, inode and space
management components. SecureFile objects
undergo 'copy on write' semantics on data
manipulation operations and hence alleviate the
requirement to store previous images for rollback
purposes. Oracle SecureFiles achieves read
consistency through 'copy-on-write' semantics thus
enabling SecureFile segments to retain previous
versions of SecureFile objects up to a certain period.
A query on a SecureFile object issued at a point in
time within the retention period is guaranteed to
return the most consistent version of the object as of
that point in time.
3.2 Data Durability
Oracle SecureFiles System design supports a range
of data durability options. The design provides
choice to the users to either use the database buffer
cache to stage writes on SecureFile object buffers or
to use the underlying storage for direct writes of
SecureFile object buffers. Direct writes prevent
pollution of buffer cache for large I/Os. Direct write
operations can also be logged for media recovery
purposes. The accompanying relational data, inode
metadata and on-disk space metadata changes
modify Oracle data blocks in the buffer cache itself
and are logged in Oracle Redo logs.
4 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
The evaluation experiment simulates a real world
DICOM application consisting of digital diagnostic
images accompanied by patient metadata. We
compare read and write throughput of SecureFiles to
that of NFSv3 filesystem. In both cases patient
metadata is stored in the Oracle database. In the case
of filesystem, the images are stored on Ext3 FS file
servers that are accessed using NFSv3. In case of
ICSOFT 2008 - International Conference on Software and Data Technologies
62
SecureFiles, images are stored as SecureFile objects
within the database.
4.1 Dataset and Hardware Set-up
The dataset consists of images ranging from 10 KB
to 100 MB. The experiment consists of tests
individually run on sizes averaging 10 KB, 100 KB,
1 MB, 10 MB and 100 MB. For tests on sizes 100
MB, 10MB and 1 MB, the total amount of
unstructured data inserted as files as well as
SecureFile objects is 100 GB.
A Dell 2650 consisting of 2 hyper threaded Intel
Xeon 2.8 Ghz processors with 0.5 MB processor
cache each, 6GB of RAM and using Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4.0 was used as the client. A Dell
2850 consisting of 2 hyper threaded Intel Xeon 3.2
GHz processors with 2 MB processor cache each,
6GB of RAM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 and
2Gbit Fibre Channel SAN Host Adapter was used as
the server.
Storage drives are allocated as two identically
configured 2TB Raid 5 arrays. One of the units was
allocated to Oracle and was managed using Oracle
Automatic Storage Management. The other was
configured as Ext3 FS made available to the client
using NFSv3.
Table 1: Throughput Comparison of NFSv3 and Oracle
SecureFiles in MB/sec on read and write operations.
File Sizes (MB) .01 .1 1 10 100
NFS Performance for
Reads
3 8 22 61 75
SecureFiles
Performance for Reads
3 12 40 79 88
NFS Performance for
Writes
2 13 40 79 74
SecureFiles
Performance for
Writes
18 61 81 80 80
4.2 Experiment and Results
Table 1 demonstrates the throughput comparison
between SecureFiles and NFSv3 on the dataset on
single stream reads and writes.
SecureFiles outperforms the NFSv3 access for
all sizes with respect to read and write performance.
Gains for the smaller file sizes are also due to
reduced roundtrips where metadata and data is
accessed in one roundtrip unlike the NFSv3 case
where metadata and file is accessed in separate
roundtrips. Read performance for larger file sizes is
contributed by intelligent pre-fetching, larger I/O
sizes due to better contiguous space allocations and
network optimisations.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Current content management applications use
filesystems to store unstructured data due to
provision of better throughput of data and access
operations across all sizes and types and use
database systems to manage accompanying
relational metadata for indexing and querying
purposes. This dichotomy in storage creates a need
for compromises in one or more of high availability,
scalability, performance or functionality. With
Oracle 11g Database Server's SecureFiles
capabilities we now have a next generation unified
data management platform without compromises.
Performance evaluations demonstrate that Oracle
SecureFiles unstructured and relation data
management provides optimal execution throughput
and scalability for unstructured content while
preserving the same for relational content
REFERENCES
Blumberg, R., Atre, S. The Problem with Unstructured
Data. DM Review Magazine, Feb. 2003.
Hobbs, L. Information Lifecycle Management with Oracle
database 11g. An Oracle White Paper, June 2007
Vijayan, P. Iron File Systems. Thesis Submitted for
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Sciences,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006.
Oracle Database 11g Product Family. An Oracle White
Paper, January 2008.
Biggar, H. Experiencing Data De-Duplication: Improving
Efficiency and Reducing Capacity Requirements. A
SearchStorage.com White Paper, Feb 2007.
ORACLE SECUREILES - A Filesystem Architecture in Oracle Database Server
63