Partitioning for optimal parallel performance

This exercise assumes that the following conditions are true:

• You narrowed the focus to a few critical queries that are running sequentially. It is best to include a mix of I/O-intensive and processor-intensive queries into this initial set. You know how long those queries take now and what your performance objectives for those queries are. Although tuning for one set of queries might not work for all queries, overall performance and throughput can be improved.
• You are optimizing for query-at-a-time operations, and you want a query to use all of the processor and I/O resources available to it.

  When you run many queries at the same time, you might need to increase the number of partitions and the amount of processing power to achieve similar elapsed times.

This information guides you through the following analyses:

1. Determining the nature of the query (what balance of processing and I/O resources it needs)
2. Determining the ideal number of partitions for your table space, based on the nature of the query and on the processor and I/O configuration at your site