ABSTRACT The Science Data Processing System (SDPS) application, desc ribed herein as an example, has had a long development cycle. The SDPS application inco rporates IDL, C++, and Perl programming languages, with significant use of an Oracle Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). The time involved from initial design, 1996, to operational deployment, on July 15 th , 2004, with the launch of the Aura spacecraft, spans several releases of the Oracle RDBMS. New database versions usher in new features and performance enhancements, sometimes requiring modifications to custom application code to take full advantage of improvements in technology. For a project with an aggressive release schedule, major redesigns of the custom code could jeopardize the successful completion of mission criteria. Over time, higher throughput requirements and hardware improvements in the application computing infrastructure revealed database performance bottlenecks due to increased sc anning frequency of ever-growing tables and indexes. The Distributed Schema (DS) database redesi gn successfully addressed the database scalability and performance limitations, with only minor SIPS application changes and no changes to the TES SDPS application. Keywords: Oracle, database, data processing, performance, scalability, atmospheric, chemistry, spectrometer