This paper is based on the Author’s experiences in performance analysis and tuning for DB2 UDB on distributed platforms. The paper is intended as an introduction to DB2 performance, particularly for those who already have a grasp of relational database concepts through products like SQL Server or Oracle. The paper compares and contrasts DB2 and Oracle, describes the primary sources of DB2 performance and resource consumption data, and covers memory management, physical data storage, indexing &amp; sorting, and locking. The paper concludes with a summary of some new features expected in DB2. 1 