OLTP clients require subsecond response for transactions. Consider how table fragmentation schemes affect response time in the following three ways:
In general, serial plans are best for fast OLTP transactions. Carefully designed fragmentation schemes can ensure serial plans for specific transactions.
Contention among transactions for table fragments and disk access can slow response. To minimize contention, fragment tables and locate the fragments on separate disks, if possible.
If single transactions are used to update one or a few rows, both serial plans and lack of contention contribute to the speed of updating. If data is updated by batch jobs of various sorts, consider how your fragmentation scheme might affect the process. For information about improving batch update jobs, seeImproving Large Data Updates.