Usability and design considerations for an autonomic relational database management system

Autonomic systems offer numerous advantages over non-autonomic systems, and many of these advantages relate to ease of use. The advantages regarding ease of use include reducing the number of low-level system administration tasks, simplifying the system administrator’s interface, handling exceptions which would otherwise have resulted in system alerts, and the learning, by the system, of actions taken by the administrator. However, human intervention must still be factored in, and care must be taken in the design of autonomic systems not to make the system administrator’s task more difficult. This paper examines the ease-of-use ramifications of autonomic computing in the context of relational databases in general, and of the IBM DB2 Universal Database Version 8.1 autonomic computing system in particular.