Handling very large databases with informix extended parallel server

In this paper, we investigate which problems exist in very large real databases and describe which mechanisms are provided by Informix Extended Parallel Server (XPS) for dealing with these problems. Currently the largest customer XPS database contains 27 TB of data. A database server that has to handle such an amount of data has to provide mechanisms which allow achieving adequate performance and easing the usability. We will present mechanisms which address both of these issues and illustrate them with examples from real customer systems.