DB Issues - performance

Factors affecting the performance of a database environment

Equipment oriented performance
- Speed and performance of the hardware.
- In a distributed database the speed of communications
- The interface, graphical or text based.
- Latency - a time delay that is inherent in the hardware (eg. Hard disk access)
- Throughput - the amount of traffic that a system can manage.
User-oriented performance
- Response time determined by;
  - Database size
  - Recovery mechanism overheads
  - Structure of the database
    - Multiple table joins.
    - Multiple indexes on files.
  - Fragmentation of data in the tables.
  - The number of concurrent users.