1.2.5 Vaults

An Exascale vault is a logical storage container that uses the physical resources provided by Exascale storage pools. Each vault is associated with at least one storage pool. At most, a vault may be associated with one storage pool for each type of storage media (one HC storage pool and one EF storage pool).

By default, a vault can use all the underlying storage pool resources. However, an Exascale administrator can limit the amount of space, I/O resources (I/Os per second, or IOPS), and cache resources associated with each vault.

To an end-user and Oracle Database, a vault appears like a top-level directory that contains files. Exascale uses the convention of beginning vault names with the ampersand (@) character (for example, @MYVAULT). So, a fully-qualified Exascale file path always begins with the ampersand (@) character and vault name, followed by the rest of the file path (for example, @MYVAULT/myexample/myfilename).

Exascale vaults facilitate strict data separation, ensuring that data is isolated to specific users and separated from other data and users. A vault, and its contents, are invisible to users without the appropriate privileges. Without the correct entitlements, users of one vault cannot see another vault, even though data from both vaults may be striped across the same underlying storage pools.