Performance Versus Business Requirements

Factors that affect performance:

• Frequent checkpointing
• Performing archiving
• Block check sums
• Redundancy
• Frequent backups of data files
• Multiple control files
• Multiple redo log members in a group
• Security
• Auditing
• Encryption
• Virtual Private Database/Fine Grained Access Control

There is always a cost of doing business in certain ways. Often the requirements of the business can impact performance. The impact of downtime and crash recovery, and even the unlikely event of block corruption, must be considered against the overhead of protecting against these events. Redundancy improves availability but requires more I/Os

The question is not whether to use the security features but what is required, and use only those features.

Often the business can only tolerate minimal downtime, so you configure the database for the business, and then tune your database accordingly. The uptime requirement, the mean time to recovery, and the amount of data that could be lost in a disk or system crash are all business issues.