SLA Definition for Multi-Tenant DBMS and its Impact on Query Optimization

In the cloud context, users are often called tenants. A cloud DBMS shared by many tenants is called a multi-tenant DBMS. The resource consolidation in such a DBMS allows the tenants to only pay for the resources that they consume, while providing the opportunity for the provider to increase its economic gain. For this, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is usually established between the provider and a tenant. However, in the current systems, the SLA is often defined by the provider, while the tenant should agree with it before using the service. In addition, only the availability objective is described in the SLA, but not the performance objective. In this paper, an SLA negotiation framework is proposed, in which the provider and the tenant define the performance objective together in a fair way. To demonstrate the feasibility and the advantage of this framework, we evaluate its impact on query optimization. We formally define the problem by including the cost-efficiency aspect, we design a cost model and study the plan search space for this problem, we revise two search methods to adapt to the new context, and we propose a heuristic to solve the resource contention problem caused by concurrent queries of multiple tenants. We also conduct a performance evaluation to show that, our optimization approach (i.e., driven by the SLA) can be much more cost-effective than the traditional approach which always minimizes the query completion time.