Almaden Institute

SMART—A DB2 That Manages Itself Abstract: With the cost of both hardware and software decreasing rapidly due to technological advancements and economies of scale, the cost of ownership for database applications is increasingly dominated by the cost of people to manage them. Databases are growing rapidly in scale and complexity, while skilled database administrators (DBAs) are becoming rarer and more expensive. The scope of responsibilities for DBAs is indeed daunting. This talk will describe the SMART (Self-Managing And Resource Tuning) Project, a DB2 family project aimed at making DB2 easier to manage. We’ll give an overview of the project’s goals, participants, priorities, and approach. In addition, we’ll describe some initial tools we are developing to help beleaguered DBAs, as well as the wealth of challenging research topics in this area.  Guy Lohman - Bio Guy M. Lohman : Manager, Advanced Optimization in the Advanced Database Solutions Dept., IBM Research lohman@almaden.ibm.com Dr. Guy M. Lohman is Manager of Advanced Optimization in the Advanced Database Solutions Department at IBM Research Division’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and has 20 years of experience in relational database query optimization. He is the architect of the Optimizer of the DB2 Universal Data Base (UDB) for Unix and Windows and was responsible for its development in Versions 2 and 5 of DB2 for Unix, Windows, and OS/2, as well as the invention and prototyping of the Visual Explain tool to display query plans. Dr. Lohman was one of two first-line Almaden managers responsible for Starwinds, a joint project with Software Solutions Division personnel in Toronto and Santa Teresa to incorporate the Starburst extensible query processing technologies prototyped at Almaden into the DB2 UDB product. More recently, he was a co-inventor and designer of the DB2 Index Wizard (DB2 Advisor), and a co-founder of the SMART (Self-Managing And Resource Tuning) project to make DB2 autonomic. His current research interests involve query optimization and self-managing database systems.