A pair of recent OTN forum threads raised questions about using SecureFiles with the E-Business Suite. I’m very pleased to let you know that SecureFiles is supported for use with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12. SecureFiles is a new Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition feature that allows the efficient storage and management of file or unstructured data via LOBs.
SecureFiles features entirely new disk formats, network protocol, space management, redo and undo formats, buffer caching, and intelligent I/O subsystem. SecureFiles represents the core infrastructure for managing unstructured content inside the Oracle database. It has additional advanced features for deduplication, compression, encryption, and advanced logging.
Works Transparently with the E-Business Suite
SecureFiles is completely transparent to the E-Business Suite. In other words, you can follow the generic Oracle SecureFiles documentation to use online redefinition to enable this feature for E-Business Suite databases:
As far as E-Business Suite databases are concerned:
- SecureFiles works transparently with both Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12.
- No additional database or E-Business Suite patches are required.
- No special configuration options are required.
Considerations for EBS Environments
Given the wholly transparent nature of this database feature, we haven’t published any special whitepapers or Metalink Notes for E-Business Suite environments. We would consider the use of SecureFiles to be a very benign customization, similar to, say, applying custom partitioning to a table.
That said, your users’ transactional mix, your historical production data, and your database server and storage configurations will all affect overall performance. As with all customizations, you should test your environment thoroughly before enabling SecureFiles in a production environment.
What Have You Found?
We’re eager to hear about your experiences with SecureFiles in your E-Business Suite environments. If you have anecdotal remarks about how well it’s worked for you, please drop me a line or post a comment here. Any statistics or performance benchmarks would be even more welcome.
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