A meta-advisor repository for database physical design

Abstract

The physical design is one of the crucial phases of advanced database design life cycle. This is due to its important role in selecting optimization structures such as materialized views, indexes, and partitioning to speed up the performance of queries. This phase has been amplified by the continually needs of storing and managing in efficient way the deluge of data in storage systems. This situation motivates the editors of commercial and non-commercial Database Management Systems (e.g. SQL Tuning Advisor-Oracle and Parinda-PostgreSQL) to propose tools (called advisors) to assist database administrators in their tasks when selecting their relevant optimization structures for a given database/data warehouse schema and a workload. The maturity of research performed in the physical design motivates us to go further and capitalize the knowledge and expertise in terms of processes, the algorithms, the cost models used to quantify the benefit of the selected optimization structures, etc. used by the research community. In this paper, we first propose a physical design language called PhyDL that allows describing all inputs and outputs of the physical design phase. Secondly, to increase the reuse of the existing advisors, we elaborate a repository called Meta-Advisor that persists all components of the physical design. Finally, a case study of our contribution is presented to stress the meta-advisor repository and highlights its importance.