Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Getting Started:
Database Essentials

Additional factors to consider in monitoring performance

The following list identifies other factors you should consider:

One of the greatest impacts on performance and availability of data over time is a fluctuation in the number of users.
The volume of data involved is another factor to consider when evaluating performance.
A poorly written query on a large amount of data causes a performance impact.

Keep in mind that performance impact is not always linear. An example of this is a repeating query that scans the entire table for a particular record or pattern. When the table is small, all of the information can be stored in memory. But once the table grows beyond the size of the buffer pool, it will cause a significant amount of degradation to the system due to continual physical reads to the disk. This not only affects the query in question, but all other users accessing the database.