1. A database appliance, comprising: one or more processors; one or more storage devices operatively coupled to the one or more processors; an operating system; and a modified database server generated from another database server by modifying the code of the other database server, wherein the modified database server is a database server that was produced from the other database server by: determining whether the database appliance is for use in conjunction with an online transaction processing (OLTP) application or an online analytical processing (OLAP) application; if the database appliance is for use in conjunction with an OLTP application, then the other database server is optimized for I/O performance to produce the modified database server; if the database appliance is for use in conjunction with an OLAP application, then the other database server is optimized for computation performance to produce the modified database server; wherein the modified database server obtains services of the operating system by making calls to the operating system during execution of the modified database server; and wherein the database appliance allocates a CPU share for a process and assigns a priority to the process based on the changing resource demands associated with the process.