That means they are equally capable of performing an application's tasks assigned by the operating system. As a result, the processors are rarely idle. Windows NT, Microsoft's network operating system, also has an SMP capability. To give organizations applications that run on SMP, the major database vendors have developed SMP versions of their core database products. To enable a database system to achieve a high rate of performance on a SMP computer, it has to support parallelism and multi-threading.
Parallelism allows the database system to divide tasks so that they can be completed sooner.
Normally, database operations, utilities and query processing, are performed sequentially, but parallelism allows the system to process different portions of the data concurrently, which boosts the system's throughput. Multi-threading enables a database system to handle multiple user requests and concurrent transactions. Database systems from Oracle, Informix and Sybase support these methods of multiprocessing. Informix's Version 7 of its OnLine Dynamic Server is used primarily for three classes of SMP applications, according to David Watson, a product marketing manager for Informix. The bulk of the demand is for running online transaction processing followed by data warehousing and multimedia.