A partitioned database can use multiple CPUs to satisfy requests for information. Retrieval and update requests are automatically allocated into sub-requests and executed in parallel on the database partition servers on each machine.
As an illustration of the power of processing in a partitioned database system, assume that you have 100,000,000 records that you want to scan in a single-partition database. This scan would require that a single database manager search 100,000,000 records. Now suppose that these records are spread evenly over 20 database partition servers; each database manager only has to scan 5,000,000 records. If each database manager scans at the same time and with the same speed, the time required to complete the scan should be approximately 5% of that required of a single-partition system handling this task.