Autonomic buffer pool configuration in PostgreSQL

As database management systems (DBMSs) continue to expand into new application areas, the complexity of the systems and the diversity of database workloads are increasing. Managing the performance of DBMSs via manual adjustment of resource allocations in this new environment has become impractical. Autonomic DBMSs shift the responsibility for performance management onto the systems themselves. This paper serves as a proof of concept, illustrating how autonomic principles can be applied to a DBMS to provide automatic sizing of buffer pools, a key resource in a DBMS. We describe an implementation of our autonomic system in PostgreSQL, an open source database management system, and provide a set of experiments that verify our approach.