It is a clever and original product idea, and will make content and file management on large file systems much easier in a future release. IFS has to do better than a normal file server to be interesting, and it does. IFS is highly programmable and has very good built-in XML support. IFS's biggest weakness is its lack of directory integration, even with Oracle 8i's own user list. We also could not apply file permission changes recursively, a key maintenance feature, and IFS is very resource-intensive.
Performance has a big question mark.
Oracle could not meet our request to quantify IFS's overhead against a file server baseline. Executives said that the product was too new, as a 1.x release, to handle comparative performance testing. Potential buyers should take this into account. Oracle 8i is significantly more expensive than any other database option. This includes IFS, but lacks many of the SQL features that are included in rival products.