Trigger performance not good

Hi all,

I have one SQL AFTER INSERT trigger program and one SQL AFTER UPDATE
trigger program and I'm not happy with the performance.

Does anyone know of any published numbers for what is considered acceptable
performance statistics?

I've tried inserting and updating anywhere from 500 to 12,000 rows at a
time.
I averaged 12 insert test times and 12 update test times, excluding the
first test in each batch, which is always higher, to produce the following
results:

When inserting rows, the avg elapsed times are:
without trigger: 1.193 secs / thousand
with trigger: 36.151 secs / thousand
A factor of 30x slowdown.

When updating rows, the avg elapsed times are:
without trigger: .482 secs / thousand
with trigger 32.804 secs / thousand
A factor of 68x slowdown.

I find the above factors of slowdown appalling.

The purpose of the triggers is to write the incoming information to an
interface table.
The table that has the triggers active has 422 columns. The interface
table will receive all 422 columns plus additional information to make a
total of 541 columns.
Of the 541 columns, I'm calling a UDF for 107 of them. My next task is to
see if the UDFs can be improved.

I'm not sure what else could be slowing the process down.
The interface table has a generated identity column. NO CACHE or CACHE 200
makes no difference. I haven't tried it without the identity column since
I really want this but it would be interesting to see the difference.

I'm using this method:
REFERENCING OLD TABLE AS OLD_ITEM
NEW TABLE AS NEW_ITEM
FOR EACH STATEMENT
MODE DB2SQL

I tried this method, which was much slower (avg 74 secs/thousand):
REFERENCING OLD ROW AS OLD_ITEM
NEW ROW AS NEW_ITEM
FOR EACH ROW
MODE DB2ROW

I'm wondering what can be done to accomplish the same end result and have
the least impact on the application doing the update/insert of the master
table.

If I first write the information to an intermediate table first and have a
trigger on this table to execute the UDFs and write to the interface table,
would the application still be waiting for everything to be complete?

Is there any performance monitoring that can be done for triggers?

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Thank you.

Yours truly,

Glenn Gundermann
Email: glenn.gundermann@xxxxxxxxx
Work: (416) 675-9200 ext. 89224
Cell: (416) 317-3144