Towards Autonomic Workload Management in DBMSs

Workload management is the discipline of effectively managing, controlling and monitoring work flow across computing systems. It is an increasingly important requirement of database management systems (DBMSs) in view of the trends towards server consolidation and more diverse workloads. Workload management is necessary so the DBMS can be business-objective oriented, can provide efficient differentiated service at fine granularity and can maintain high utilization of resources with low management costs. We see that workload management is shifting from offline planning to online adaptation. In this paper we discuss the objectives of workload management in autonomic DBMSs and provide a framework for examining how current workload management mechanisms match up with these objectives. We then use the framework to study several mechanisms from both DBMS products and research efforts. We also propose directions for future work in the area of workload management for autonomic DBMSs.