Oracle UCM 11g made huge strides in the high-volume ingestion and storage capability. If you’re looking at highly transactional, high-volume scanning, or large migration of content off of shared directories into UCM then you need to read this post!
The enhanced web app architecture combined with the file store provider (part of UCM) means that you can achieve extremely fast and high volume checkins / storage. Oracle published a good benchmarking report on the 11g capabilities in late 2010 (link PDF warning). The levels run from 11million items ingested per day (200KB pdf, txt & MS doc) to 23million items per day (4kb pdf,txt &ms doc) with UCM cpus staying below 64% at the high end and Database cpus staying below 59% at the high end. That means that UCM is now effectively an I/O limited enterprise content management system. This is a huge advance over 10g or legacy Stellent levels.
Of course this presupposes that your file storage architecture can also handle the volume. This is where the File Store Provider (aka “FSP”) comes in. (documentation link) The FSP acts as a location broker that, based on criteria that you define, puts files in the network accessible location you designate. This means that you can have files stored in the Database, on NAS/SAN, or on the default vault/weblayout file system directory structure OR ANY COMBINATION OF ALL THREE. To users / applications storing content in UCM the persistent URL location of the document stays the same. UCM interprets the location of the file against the defined FSP “partitions” (aka storage devices) where the binaries are located and serves them up to the requestor (again, either a user or application or service).
Because FSP is criteria driven, you can change storage locations with a metadata update. That means you can define a new FSP “partition”, tie its criteria to a metadata value, update the metadata of the content batch you want to move into the new location and you’re off to the races.
So I’ve made several assumptions here.
1) you want to take content or attachments from some application (e.g. BI Publisher, ERP system like EBS, PSFT or Siebel) and store those in UCM.
2) you have a lot of content coming from that system and need to store it in UCM quickly and without killing your default UCM vault and weblayout directory limits
Oracle has productized adapters for some applications and partner organizations like us at Fishbowl Solutions have built bespoke integrations for others (PSFT Financials, EBS). These still require the file store providers to be defined so that the content coming from those apps can be efficiently stored but also secured and (ideally) resurfaced for other applications too (like WCM reports and dashboards).
