SMART: Making DB2 (More) Autonomic Guy M. Lohman Sam S. Lightstone IBM Almaden Research Center IBM Toronto Software Lab K55/B1, 650 Harry Rd. 8200 Warden Ave. San Jose, CA 95120-6099 Markham, L6G 1C7 Ontario U.S.A. Canada
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract The database community has already made many significant contributions toward autonomic systems. IBM’s SMART (Self-Managing And Resource Separating the logical schema from the physical schema, Tuning) project aims to make DB2 self- permitting different views of the same data by different managing, i.e. autonomic, to decrease the total applications, and the entire relational model of data, all cost of ownership and penetrate new markets. simplified the task of building new database applications. Over several releases, increasingly sophisticated Declarative query languages such as SQL, and the query SMART features will ease administrative tasks optimizers that made them possible, further aided such as initial deployment, database design, developers. But with the exception of early research in system maintenance, problem determination, and the late 1970s and early 1980s on database design ensuring system availability and recovery. algorithms, little has been done to help the beleaguered database administrator (DBA) until quite recently, with 1. Motivation for Autonomic Databases the founding of the AutoAdmin project at Microsoft [http://www.research.microsoft.com/dmx/autoadmin/] and While Moore’s Law and competition decrease the per-unit the SMART project at IBM, described herein. cost of hardware and software, the shortage of skilled professionals that can comprehend the growing complexity of information technology (IT) systems 2.