In a multiengine environment, any available engine can process the next task in the global run queue. The engine affinity attribute lets you assign a task to an engine or to a group of engines. There are two ways to use task-to-engine affinity:
Associate less critical execution objects with a defined group of engines to restrict the object to a subset of the total number of engines. This reduces processor availability for those objects. The more critical execution objects can execute on any Adaptive Server engine, so performance for them improves because they have the benefit of the resources that the less critical ones are deprived of.
Associate more critical execution objects with a defined group of engines to which less critical objects do not have access. This ensures that the critical execution objects have access to a known amount of processing power.
EC1 and EC2 do not set engine affinity for the execution object; however, EC3 sets affinity to the Adaptive Server engine with the highest engine number in the current configuration.
You can create engine groups with sp_addengine and bind execution objects to an engine group with sp_addexeclass. If you do not want to assign engine affinity for a user-defined execution class, using ANYENGINE as the engine group parameter allows the task to run on any engine.
The engine affinity attribute is not used for stored
procedures.
