for unifying the distributed data, giving it the appearance of a single, large database. As a simple illustration, consider a widely distributed database for an organization that has its headquarters in Seattle, and branch offices in Boston, London and Mumbai. Each office owns and maintains employee records locally, but the headquarters also performs reporting on the entire organization. The database at each location has a structure identical to the others, and although it is a fully contained database at each location, it is also considered a partition of the larger global database. In this case, the partitioning is based on geographical location. The mechanism for querying a distributed database is simple for the programmer. When the database is opened, all partitions are referenced together, with OR symbols (“|”) between the individual partition names. Partitioning and unified queries are also used for scaling the performance. Consider a database where each operation begins with a lookup of a record’s primary key. If the“database” is composed of four partitions, each stored on the same multi-core computer, but on different disks controlled by different disk controllers, then the only requirement is a scheme that divides the primary key among the four partitions. If that scheme is a modulo of the primary key, then the application quickly determines which partition to store a record into or read the record from. Since there are multiple CPU cores to run the multiple processes (both the applications and the TFSs), and the four partitions are accessible in parallel (the four controllers permit this), the processing capacity is four times larger than with a single-core, single-disk, and single-partition configuration. Database encryption RDM allows all database content to be encrypted before it is transported across a network and written to the database files. RDM's encryption supports the Rijndael/AES encryption algorithm with 128-, 192- or 256-bit keys based on an application-specified encryption key. Database Mirroring and HA Support Database mirroring in RDM reproduces an exact, byte-for-byte copy of a master database onto the mirrored (or slave) database. Database mirroring is an important database feature for applications that require high availability (HA) where should a TFServer fail for some reason, then the application's HA monitor can automatically switch over to the mirrored TFServer. RDM provides synchronous mirroring where each transaction that is committed on the master TFServer is also securely committed to the mirror TFServer. RDM also provides a set HA support