Introduction

There could be many situations when a non-partitioned database is not an appropriate choice. Many organizations today have high performance demands from their database systems and want to gain more value from their hardware and software.

IBM DB2 EE comes with database partitioning as an alternative option to implement a very scalable and high performance system. Database partitioning is suitable for both Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Decision Support Systems (DSS) systems.

You may partition an existent database on a single system, in a shared-everything configuration, or you can use multiple standalone systems in a shared-nothing configuration. For a large SMP system, the first method is the recommended one, because the inter-partition communication can be conducted through shared memory, which is obviously one of the fastest communication methods on the planet.

A shared-nothing configuration is recommended in cases where we have many servers with fewer hardware resources...