Oracle Internet File System

It has been found that most industries store very little information in relational databases. Many of the information are now held in file systems. The File systems basically fragment information such as documents, Web content, and many more, into separate data stores, that have their own storage and access methods. The current method of storing information in file systems has various problems:

•End users - End users have to install multiple clients each end users with its own configuration set to access the information in the separate data stores. Users also search it extremely hard to keep track of the several datatypes related with the project they're working on.

•System administrators- System administrators have a difficult time maintaining security, configuration, and performance; giving access to users; and maintaining the integrity of the data that might be spread across multiple machines and data stores.

•Application developers -   It is slow since of the necessity for developers to understand different operating system peculiarities; understand different APIs  to  access  files,  Web  content  and  relational  data;  and  keep  track  of  all  the components of the project.
One approach to simplifying the problems related with storing information in the file systems it is to move as much data as possible into a relational database like as Oracle.

Though, this approach also presents many problems.

•Certain types of information, like as email and simple files, are not efficiently used and manipulated using a relational database.

•End users have to be more "SQL aware."

•In a regular file system, you double-click a file to access its contents. For a file stored in a relational database, you have to edit the file, download the file, and upload it back to the database.

Oracle8I gives the Internet File System (IFS) to combine the file system with the database. IFS is a database file system (DBFS) which stores the data in the database, quite than leave the data outside the database and provide links from the database to access the information. Placing data inside the database provides various advantages:

•Simplified data security - Clients can access the information through using multiple protocols and client interfaces. For access IFS, you can use the subsequent protocols:

SMB permits users to drag and drop files. Files can be edited inside IFS and Access is possible by Windows NT, Windows 95 and Windows 98.