In Oracle 11g, Oracle rearchitected the management of lobs. This new structure is called SECUREFILES. The storage structure also included a number of new optimizations and security features. It is anticipated that the older storage method (now called BASICFILES) will be made obsolete in the next major release.
The storage architecture also introduced a new method for indexing the lobs, enabling faster access to parts of it. Reading and writing were also improved.
The following sections describe some of the key storage options a database administrator might want to consider when setting up tables that hold unstructured data. Example table creation statements are included at the end of the chapter.