Oracle XMLType Insert speed comparison

Question

I´ve got a quick question to the Oracle XML DB experts:

I measured the insert performance of several large xml files. In theory XMLType CLOB should have a unrivaled insert performance, because the inserted XML document is directly written in a character large object, no conversion needed. But my measurements suggest that the insert in the XMLType BINARY column is much faster, although it is a preparsed binary format. Can someone tell me how this is possible?

Answer 1

Actually, if the documents are large i'd expect Binary to be better, as with Binary XML you'll find the stored data is smaller, so you're saving on disk IO on writing all that data away. I guess the overall comparison would depend on the time saved on IO vs extra CPU time on converting to binary on your system.