In this paper we briefly present an existing database system with its advantages and disadvantages. The system uses an approach that significantly improves flexibility and maintainability. A performance model has been developed for the system, thus making it possible to quantitatively compare the performance reduction caused by the increased maintainability. Validations using real-world scenarios and data show that the performance model is very accurate. The model and validation show that the performance loss of using the flexible approach is substantial. Based on insights gained from the performance model, we improve performance by using different data-striping techniques. We show the effect of standard RAID 0 striping, and then further improve our results by using range partitioning.