Database performance tuning

The database is usually one of the potential areas for bottlenecks that makes WebSphere Commerce unable to scale and perform well. It is therefore crucial that the database is tuned appropriately for our implementation. Before you attempt to tune the database, it is important to realize that a WebSphere Commerce implementation is considered an online Transaction Processing (OLTP) application. We must tune the database for an OLTP application. The following are typical characteristics of an OLTP application:

• It has frequent insert or update activity.

• There are a high number of users that are accessing the database.

• SQL running against the database is quick and relatively simple.

• (DB2) Database (DB2) performance considerations
  The database is usually one of the potential areas for bottlenecks that makes WebSphere Commerce unable to scale and perform well. It is therefore crucial that the database is tuned for your implementation.

• (Oracle) Database (Oracle) performance considerations
  The database is typically one of the potential areas for bottlenecks that makes WebSphere Commerce unable to scale and perform well. Therefore, it is crucial that the database is tuned for our implementation.

• Optimistic locking
  Optimistic locking allows us to lower the isolation level that we use in an application so that fewer locks are placed on the database assets. It allows more applications to run concurrently against the database, and potentially increase the throughput of your applications.

• Recovering from transaction failures due to optimistic locking
  There are three main strategies we use to recover from failing transactions if there are collisions in the database due to optimistic locking: Serialization, Retry, Ignore. These strategies are contingent on the relative importance or criticality of the transaction in question.

Related reference
WebSphere Commerce default tunables