11g and the new SecureFILE LOB data type (simple quick test)

As I had to run some comparison test Oracle 10g and 11g I also did a little test with the new and fast (as Oracle promises) SecureFILE LOB data type. The test is really little as there wasn’t any time to test the feature totally out, but also this result is impressive. Of course all test occurred on the same box and the same settings:

First the 10g test:

The first step is to create a table with a CLOB data type:

SQL> create table test1 (created_tms date, data clob) tablespace data1 lob (data) store as (cache);
Table created.
SQL>

I used cache to get as much bytes as possible into the buffer cache. If you need performance on LOB anyone would activate this as first step. As next step I wrote a little PL/SQL program  which inserts 100.000 rows with a 4402 bytes (that’s 4.4GB all together!):

SQL> set serveroutput on;
SQL> declare
2    thedata CLOB := TO_CLOB (
3  ‘somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
4  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
……
49  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
50  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata ‘);
51  begin
52    dbms_output.put_line(‘Begin: ‘ || systimestamp);
53    for n in 1..100000 loop
54      insert into test1 values (sysdate,thedata);
55    end loop;
56    dbms_output.put_line(‘End: ‘ || systimestamp);
57  end;
58  /
Begin: 11-JAN-08 04.30.50.203325000 PM +01:00
End: 11-JAN-08 04.32.50.422759000 PM +01:00

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Checking the time stamp you can see that with 10g the inserts took nearly exactly 2 minutes (the last time, I executed it several times). Also you can see that I inserted the actual sysdate in a column too. So now we can compute a average of inserts per second:

SQL> select count(*)/((max(created_tms)-min(created_tms))*24*60*60) from test1;

COUNT(*)/((MAX(CREATED_TMS)-MIN(CREATED_TMS))*24*60*60)
——————————————————-
833.333333

The last 4 runs made (average inserts/second):

840.336134
826.446281
800
833.333333

So, now we going to 11g. First step: We need a table with the new SecureFILE LOB type:

SQL>
SQL> create table test1 (created_tms date, data clob) tablespace data1 lob (data) store as securefile cache;

Table created.

Next, I executed exactly the same procedure:

SQL> set serveroutput on;
SQL> declare
2    thedata CLOB := TO_CLOB (
3  ‘somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
……
49  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
50  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata ‘);
51  begin
52    dbms_output.put_line(‘Begin: ‘ || systimestamp);
53    for n in 1..100000 loop
54      insert into test1 values (sysdate,thedata);
55    end loop;
56    dbms_output.put_line(‘End: ‘ || systimestamp);
57  end;
58  /
Begin: 11-JAN-08 04.19.06.534822000 PM +01:00
End: 11-JAN-08 04.20.01.703784000 PM +01:00

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Looking at the time stamps the run took less than a minute! Remember, 10g needed around 2 minutes. So lets look to the average inserts per second:

SQL> select count(*)/((max(created_tms)-min(created_tms))*24*60*60) from test1;

COUNT(*)/((MAX(CREATED_TMS)-MIN(CREATED_TMS))*24*60*60)
——————————————————-
1818.18182

We can see that the program made average 1818 inserts per second. Compared to 833 from 10g it’s more than 100% faster! And that’s not bad without any fine tuning I would say!

The last 4 runs made:

1960.78431
1818.18182
1754.38596
1818.18182

I hope I’ve some time left to provide a good test case, but also this quick one showed that the SecureFILE  data type really speeded-up compared to convention LOB, and that’s what Oracle promised! 😉