DB2 Database Tuning Tutorial: DB2 UDB is an object-relational database server that provides a solid foundation to achieve high performance and scalability. DB2 Enterprise Server Edition was developed and optimized for the Intel Itanium processor architecture. Learn more about DB2 database tuning and DB2 tools in this database tuning tutorial.

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by Guojian Cai, IBM software developer, DB2 UDB Performance, IBM Toronto Lab, and Terry Sych, senior staff engineer, Enterprise Technology Enabling, Software and Solutions Group, Intel Corp.

TPC-H is a well-known decision-support database benchmark that stresses database, platform, and I/O performance. Optimal performance of this workload requires that the hardware and software systems be fully tuned and optimized. This white paper describes the database setup and configuration for a leading 100-GB TPC-H benchmark publication. The information contained in this paper can be used to optimize decision-support and data-warehouse workloads that are similar in nature to the TPC-H benchmark.

The TPC-H benchmark publication providing the basis for this white paper features IBM DB2 Universal Database v8.1 with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 on a MAXDATA Platinum 9000-4R Server. This server is powered by four Itanium® 2 processors with a 6-MB L3 cache, with each processor running at 1.5 GHz.

The challenge of optimizing the platform for this workload is met through a series of system and database configuration decisions and tuning steps. The workload is partitioned to take advantage of multiple processors and to improve scalability. The disk subsystem is organized for optimal performance by carefully mapping the tablespaces onto the disks.