The design of an adaptive column-store system

Abstract

A fully self-managed DBMS which does not require administrator intervention is the ultimate goal of database developers. This system should automate deploying, configuration, administration, monitoring, and tuning tasks. Although there are some advances in this field, self-managed technology is largely not ready for industrial use and remains an active area of research. One of the most crucial tasks for such a system is automated physical design tuning. A self-managed approach for this task implies that the physical design of a database should be automatically adapted to changing workloads. The problems of materialized view and index selection, data allocation, horizontal and vertical partitioning were studied for a long time, and hundreds of approaches were developed. However, most of these approaches were static, thus, unsuitable for self-managed systems. In this paper we discuss the prospects of an adaptive distributed relational column-store. We show that the column-store approach holds a great promise for construction of an efficient self-managed database. At first, we present a short survey of existing physical design studies and provide a classification of approaches. In the survey, we highlight the self-managed aspects. Then, we provide some views on the organization of a self-managed distributed column-store system. We discuss its three core components: an alerter, a reorganization controller and a set of physical design options (actions) available to such a system. We present possible approaches for each of these components and evaluate them. Several physical design problems are formulated and discussed. This study is the first step towards a creation of an adaptive distributed column-store system.