A methodology for auto-recognizing DBMS workloads

The type of the workload on a database management system (DBMS) is a key consideration in tuning the system. Allocations for resources such as main memory can be very different depending on whether the workload type is Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) or Decision Support System (DSS). A DBMS also typically experiences changes in the type of workload it handles during its normal processing cycle. Database administrators must, therefore, recognize the significant shifts of workload type that demand reconfiguring the system in order to maintain acceptable levels of performance. We envision autonomous, self-tuning DBMSs that have the capability to manage their own performance by automatically recognizing the workload type and then reconfiguring their resources accordingly. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically identifying a DBMS workload as either OLTP or DSS. We build a classification model based on the most significant workload characteristics that differenti ate OLTP from DSS and then use the model to identify any change in the workload type. We construct and compare classifiers built from two different sets of industry-standard workloads, namely the TPC-C and TPC-H benchmarks, and the Browsing and Ordering profiles from the TPC-W benchmark. We conduct various sets of experiments that show that our workload classifiers are reliable, and have high accuracy in recognizing the type of the workload mix and in estimating the degree of its concentration.