Constrained Dynamic Physical Database Design

Physical design has always been an important part of database administration. Today’s commercial database management systems offer physical design tools, which recommend a physical design for a given workload. However, these tools work only with static workloads and ignore the fact that workloads, and physical designs, may change over time. Research has now begun to focus on dynamic physical design, which can account for time-varying workloads. In this paper, we consider a dynamic but constrained approach to physical design. The goal is to recommend dynamic physical designs that reflect major workload trends but that are not tailored too closely to the details of the input workloads. To achieve this, we constrain the number of changes that are permitted in the recommended design. In this paper we present our definition of the constrained dynamic physical design problem and discuss several techniques for solving it.