Autonomic Computing in SQL Server

With the growing size of enterprise data, the task of managing a database is becoming more and more complex as well as time-consuming. A database administrator spends most of his time in activities that can be made automatic. Also, scarcity of skilled database administrators have motivated the database industry to develop autonomic database management systems (ADBMS) which can alleviate many of the database administrators´ problems. These ADBMS may have one or more autonomic properties. In this paper, autonomic characteristics of Microsoft SQL server are presented and analyzed to illustrate how self-managing behaviour of an ADBMS can reduce the workload of a DBA significantly. It has also been discussed which components of SQL Server are not fully autonomic and require Human Intervention. This provides the motivation for devising algorithms to further reduce the degree of human intervention still required in ADBMS.