To tune or not to tune?: a lightweight physical design alerter
Nicolas Bruno, Surajit Chaudhuri · 2006
In recent years there has been considerable research on au-tomating the physical design in database systems. Current techniques provide good recommendations, but are resource intensive. This makes DBAs somewhat conservative when deciding to launch a resource-intensive tuning session. In this paper, we introduce an alerter that helps determin-ing when a physical design tool should be invoked. The alerter is a lightweight mechanism that provides guaranteed lower (and upper bounds) on the improvement that a DBA could expect by invoking a comprehensive physical design tool. Moreover, it produces an accompanying recommen-dation that serves as a “proof ” for the lower bound. We show experimentally that the alerter handles large work-loads with little overhead, and help judiciously decide on launching subsequent tuning sessions. 1.