Chapter 5. Performance and Scalability

Thirty-three percent (33%) of the DB2 9 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows Advanced Database Administration exam (Exam 734) is designed to test your ability to tune a database for optimal performance by modifying registry variables and configuration parameters, creating the right indexes, and generating and analyzing data access plans. The questions that make up this portion of the exam are intended to evaluate the following:

• Your ability to identify and set DB2 registry variables that can affect database system performance

• Your ability to identify and set configuration parameters that can affect instance and database performance

• Your ability to manage and tune instance, database, and application memory usage and I/0

• Your ability to use DB2’s self-tuning memory manager

• Your ability to manage a large number of users and connections

• Your knowledge of query optimizer concepts

• Your ability to analyze and influence the optimizer’s selection of data access plans

• Your ability to exploit parallelism

• Your ability to create appropriate indexes

• Your ability to analyze performance problems

• Your ability to use deep compression