The number of threads that process each pipeline stage depends on the number of partitions. A partition is a pipeline stage that executes in a single reader, transformation, or writer thread. The number of partitions in any pipeline stage equals the number of threads in that stage.

You can define up to 64 partitions at any partition point in a pipeline. When you increase or decrease the number of partitions at any partition point, the Workflow Manager increases or decreases the number of partitions at all partition points in the pipeline. The number of partitions remains consistent throughout the pipeline. If you define three partitions at any partition point, the Workflow Manager creates three partitions at all other partition points in the pipeline. In certain circumstances, the number of partitions in the pipeline must be set to one.

Increasing the number of partitions or partition points increases the number of threads. Therefore, increasing the number of partitions or partition points also increases the load on the node. If the node contains enough CPU bandwidth, processing rows of data in a session concurrently can increase session performance. However, if you create a large number of partitions or partition points in a session that processes large amounts of data, you can overload the system.

The number of partitions that you create equals the number of connections to the source or target. If the pipeline contains a relational source or target, the number of partitions at the source qualifier or target instance equals the number of connections to the database. If the pipeline contains file sources, you can configure the session to read the source with one thread or with multiple threads.

The following image shows the threads in a mapping with three partitions:

For example, when you define three partitions across the mapping, the master thread creates three threads at each pipeline stage, for a total of 12 threads.

The Integration Service runs the partition threads concurrently. When you run a session with multiple partitions, the threads run as follows: