Utility Function-based Workload Management for DBMSs

In the practice of autonomic computing, utility functions have been applied for achieving self-optimization in autonomic computing systems. Utility functions are suggested to guide an autonomic computing system to optimize its own behavior in accordance with high-level objectives specified by the system administrators. In this paper, we present two concrete examples to illustrate how utility functions can be properly defined in database workload management systems. Our utility functions help the systems translate high-level workload business importance policies into low-level policies of database system tuning actions, and therefore ensure the workloads achieve their required performance objectives. We also discuss the fundamental properties of a proper utility function that can be used for building autonomic workload management for database management systems. Keywords-Workload Management; Database Management Systems; Utility Functions; Autonomic Computing