Compaq Reliable Transaction Router Getting Started page 31

When working with database systems, partitioning the database
Partition
can be essential to ensuring smooth and untrammeled
performance with a minimum of bottlenecks. When you
partition your database, you locate different parts of your
database on different disk drives to spread both the physical
storage of your database onto different physical media and to
balance access traffic across different disk controllers and drives.
For example, in a banking environment, you could partition
your database by account number, as shown in Figure 1–19. A
partition is a segment of your database.
Figure 1–19 Bank Partitioning Example
Appn
Appn
Server - BE
Server - BE
Accts
1-19,999
Once you have decided to partition your database, you use key
Key range
ranges in your application to specify how to route transactions
to the appropriate database partition. A key range is the
range of data held in each partition. For example, the key
range for the first partition in the bank partitioning example
goes from 00001 to 19999. You can assign a partition name in
your application program or have it set by the system manager.
Note that sometimes the terms key range and partition are
used as synonyms in code examples and samples with RTR,
TR
Appn
Server - BE
Server - BE
Accts
Accts
40,000-
20,000-
69,999
39,999
RTR Server Types
Appn
Appn
Server - BE
Accts
Accts
70,000-
90,000-
89,999
99,999
LKG-11213-98WI
Introduction 1–21