Online index selection in RDBMS by evolutionary approach

Abstract

In recent years, many algorithms for automatic physical database tuning have been proposed and successfully used in tools for administration of relational database management systems. The novel method described in this paper uses a steady-state evolutionary approach to continuously give index recommendations so that the database management system can adapt to changing workload and data distribution. Contrary to online algorithms offering recommendations on a per-query basis, our solution takes into account index reuse accross different queries. The experiments show that the quality of the recommendations obtained by the proposed method matches the quality of recommendations given by the best offline index selection algorithms. Moreover, high performance and low memory footprint of the method make it suitable for autonomic database tuning systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.