Configuring buffer pools in DB2 UDB
Xiaoyi Xu, Patrick M. Martin, Wendy Powley · Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research · 2002
Database Management Systems (DBMSs) use a main memory area as a to reduce the number of disk accesses performed by a transaction. DB2 Universal Database divides the area into a number of independent pools and each database object (table or index) is assigned to a specific pool. The tasks of configuring the pools, which defines the mapping of database objects to pools and setting a size for each of the pools, is crucial for achieving optimal performance.Mapping database objects to pools, which we refer to as the buffer pool configuration is the focus of this paper. Mapping database objects to pools can be viewed as a partitioning problem, that is, we partition the database objects into groups where each group is assigned a separate pool. The partitioning of objects is based on how the objects are used and on the inherent properties of objects. We present an approach to the configuration problem based on analyzing the access behaviour of a given database workload to the set of database objects. The approach is demonstrated with a typical OLTP workload.