Hoi - Ying Li  (MSC Graduate:  Sept 1997 - April 1999)


Thesis: "Dynamic Tuning Algorithms for Multiple Buffer Pools in a DBMS"


Abstract (full text not available)

In order to meet the performance goals of different applications, database administrators (DBAs) must adjust a number of low-level performance "knobs".   As the complexity and diversity of data types and database workloads increase, manual tuning by DBAs becomes almost impossible.  There is a need for database management systems (DBMSs) to perform automatic tuning, based on high-level performance goals provided by the DBA.  

Goal-oriented resource management is the capability of a DBMS to adjust its low-level configuration parameters in order to achieve predefined high-level performance goals.  Self-tuning algorithms achieve this.  They detect any violations of performance goals and dynamically reallocate database resources to meet those goals.

A self-tuning algorithm for multiple buffer pools is described in this thesis.  Buffer pools are a key resource in a DBMS.  The algorithm implements the concept of goal-oriented resource management by reallocating the buffer pool resources to meet the performance goals of various on-line transaction classes.  All the experimental results presented in this thesis were based on DB2/UDB and the TPC-C benchmark.