To use slices, you must enable slice support for your library at compile time. You must also configure your environment and database to support slices. Optionally, you can also indicate which portion of your keys are slice-relevant; that is, which portions of your keys are used to determine which slice they belong to.

Be aware that use of slices has some ramifications when it comes to transactional processing of of multiple records within a single transaction. Because your records are distributed not just across physical databases, but also across physical environments, atomic operations can only be performed on records contained within the same physical slice.

Note

Slices are not supported for Windows in this release.

Enabling Slices

To create a sliced database, do all of the following:

1. Configure slice support for your environment using the set_slice_count DB_CONFIG parameter. This parameter simply identifies the total number of slices you want to use. For best performance, the number of slices you configure should be equal to the number of cores available on your platform.

   Because using slices means that a sub-environment is created for each slice, it is sometimes necessary to perform configuration on a sub-environment basis. You can do this using the DB_CONFIG parameter.