2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshop

The ability of a database management system (DBMS) to detect problems or problem trends (which have not yet manifested as problems) and either take corrective actions, and/or provide advice or an automated notification to the database administrator (DBA) is absolutely crucial to ensure the "always-on" and "always-operational" environments. Any DBMS related failure could be prohibitively expensive ... View full abstract»

Traditionally, DBMSs are shipped with hundreds of configuration parameters. Since the database performance highly depends on the appropriate settings of the configuration parameters, DBAs spend a lot of their time and effort to find the best parameter values for tuning the performance of the application of interest. In many cases, they rely on their experience and some rules of thumbs. However, ti... View full abstract»

In the context of adaptive query processing (AQP), several techniques have been proposed for dynamically adapting/redistributing processor load assignments throughout a computation to take account of varying resource capabilities. The effectiveness of these techniques depends heavily on when and to what they adapt processor load assignments, particularly in the presence of varying load imbalance. ... View full abstract»

Performance of proxy caches for database federations that serve a large number of users is crucially dependent on its physical design. Current techniques, automated or otherwise, for physical design depend on the identification of a representative workload. In proxy caches, however, such techniques are inadequate since workload characteristics change rapidly. This is remarkably shown at the proxy ... View full abstract»

Virtual machine technologies offer simple and practical mechanisms to address many manageability problems in database systems. For example, these technologies allow for server consolidation, easier deployment, and more flexible provisioning. Therefore, database systems are increasingly being run on virtual machines. This offers many opportunities for researchers in self-managing database systems, ... View full abstract»

Modern enterprises often deploy multiple databases from different vendors. Managing a heterogeneous mix of databases is a very challenging exercise. To help the DBA tackle this complex administrative task, major database vendors have provided many autonomic tools. The tools help automate common management tasks and even help in performance tuning. However, the DBA now has to face the complexity of... View full abstract»

Quality of service is a key issue in current and future computer systems. Applications run on systems and typically access a backend DBMS which doesn't provide performance-related QoS guarantees, and whose resources are constrained. Throughput increases with the number of concurrent transactions until it reaches a saturation point (optimal EC) where more concurrent transactions lead to a drop in t... View full abstract»

User satisfaction determines the success of Web-database applications. User satisfaction can be expressed in terms of expected response time or expected delay. Given the bursty and unpredictable behavior of web user populations, we model user requests as transactions with soft-deadlines. For such a model of user requests with soft- deadlines, the hit ratio is not the most expressive metric. Instea... View full abstract»