Automated Storage Layout for Database Systems

Modern storage systems are complex. Today, storage systems have their own administrators, who use specialized tools and expertise to configure and manage storage resources. As a result, database administrators are no longer in direct control of the configuration of their database systems' underlying storage resources. This introduces problems because database physical design and storage configuration are closely related tasks, and the separation makes it more difficult to achieve a good end-to-end design. For instance, the performance of a database system depends strongly on the storage layout of database objects, such as tables and indexes, and the separation makes it hard to design a storage layout that is tuned to the I/O workload generated by the database system. In this book we analyze this problem and attempt to close the information gap between database and storage tiers by addressing the problem of predicting the storage (I/O) workload that will be generated by a database management system. We then present a storage layout optimization methodology, which leverages such workload information to generate an optimized layout for a given set of database objects.