IBM Tivoli Monitoring > Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2 > Installation Guides > Installation Guide > Performance tuning > Tivoli Data Warehouse > Relational database design and performance tuning for DB2 Database servers > Tuning
IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Version 6.3 Fix Pack 2
Buffer pools
The buffer pool is the area of memory where database pages, table rows or indexes, are temporarily read and manipulated. All buffer pools are located in global memory, which is available to all applications using the database. The purpose of the buffer pool is to improve database performance.
Data can be accessed much faster from memory than from disk. Therefore, as the database manager is able to read from or write to more data (rows and indexes) to memory, database performance improves.
The default buffer pool allocation is usually not sufficient for production applications, and must be monitored and tuned before placing your application in production. The DB2 default value is typically too low, particularly for the Tivoli Data Warehouse. Start with a value of 50 -75 percent of your system memory if the database server is dedicated. You can use the SQL statement ALTER BUFFERPOOL to change this value.
Parent topic:
Tuning