An Integrated Approach to Performance Monitoring for Autonomous Tuning

With an ever growing complexity and data volume, the administration of today´s relational database management systems has become one of the most important cost factors in their operation. Dynamic workloads and shifting demands require continuous effort from the DBA to deliver adequate performance. The goal of a modern DBMS must be to support the DBA´s work with automated processes and workflows that facilitate quick and precise decisions. In this paper, we present the concept of an integrated performance monitoring in the Ingres DBMS that provides long-term collection of information valuable for performance tuning, problem identification and prediction. The approach of enhancing the DBMS core with monitoring features rather than adding an additional watchdog on top of the system leads to a high data resolution while still having only a minimal overhead. This concept was successfully prototyped in Ingres with a very small overhead for most usage scenarios. The prototype is able to collect and analyze data and to give useful recommendations on the physical database design to improve overall performance of the DBMS.