Juan Zhang  (MSC Graduate: Sept 1998 - Jan 2001)


Thesis: "Goal Oriented Buffer Pool Tuning Algorithms for Decision Support Workloads"


Abstract (full text not available)

Database Administrators (DBAs) manage the performance of the database management systems (DBMSs) by manually adjusting low-level system parameters.  The process of configuring and tuning DBMSs is both complex and time-consuming.  As the complexity and diversity of data types and database workloads increase, manually tuning by DBAs is becoming almost impossible.

More and more database experts agree that moving the responsibility for tuning the DBMSs away from the DBA onto the system itself will be necessary in the next generation of DBMSs.  The DBMS, therefore, would automatically tune low-level configuration parameters based on pre-defined high-level performance goals provided by the DBA.

A self-tuning DBMS needs algorithms to manage its resources.  These algorithms detect the violations of system performance and dynamically reallocate resources to improve the performance of the system.  This thesis presents a self-tuning algorithm for a key resource in a DBMS, namely its buffer pool.  The algorithm is aimed at tuning large complex queries that involve multiple joins, which are typical of decision-support workloads.  It uses the information from the query optimizer to guide buffer allocation.  The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by a set of experiments with DB2 Universal Database [IBM] and compared with another self-tuning algorithm, the Dynamic Reconfiguration Algorithm [LI99].