Performance of DB2 Enterprise-Extended Edition on NT with Virtual Interface Architecture

DB2 Universal Database Enterprise-Extended Edition (DB2 UDB EEE) is a parallel relational database management system using a shared-nothing architecture. DB2 UDB EEE uses multiple nodes connected by an interconnect and partitions data across these nodes. The communication protocol used between nodes of DB2 UDB EEE has historically been Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) / Internet Protocol (IP) but has now been extended to include the Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture. This paper discusses a new protocol termed Virtual Interface Protocol (VIP), built on top of the primitives provided by the VI Architecture. DB2 UDB EEE with VIP on a fast interconnect has shown significant improvement in reducing the elapsed time of queries when compared with TCP/IP over fast ethernet. This paper discusses the implementation and performance results on a Transaction Processing Council's Decision (TPC-D) support database.