LOBs

The plain old LOB is a new data type for the Oracle 11g database. It supports compression of the data. And it sports better performance. You get a LOB column when you define a column with the SECUREFILE keyword.

Even with compression, LOBs may take up a lot of space. That is why Oracle has a feature called deduplication. This will detect when there is more than one copy of a LOB in the database. It will then cause these to reference just one copy of the LOB. You enable this feature by modifying the column using the DEDUPLICATE LOB keywords.

Oracle now provides encryption which is done at the block level. You get to choose your encryption algorithm such as 3DES or AES. Note that you can specify the key length of the encryption (128, 192, or 256 bits). You enable encryption on a column by modifying it and using the ENCRYPT USING keywords.

There is a promotion strategy to get old large object to use the new Oracle 11g type. This option allows the table with the old types to be available while the promotion is taking place. The promotion is accomplished with calls to the DBMS_REDEFINITION built in package.