Adaptive Architectures for Robust Data Management Systems

Abstract

Form follows function is a well-known expression by the architect Sullivan asserting that the architecture of a building should follow its function. 'Adaptive Architectures for Robust Data Management Systems' is a dissertation asserting that DBMS architectures should follow changing workload and hardware to robustly achieve high DBMS performance. The dissertation first evaluates how workload and hardware affect the performance of DBMSs with static architectures. This evaluation concludes that static DBMS architectures degrade DBMS performance under changing workload and hardware, and hence the DBMS architecture has to become adaptive. Subsequently, adaptation concepts for the architecture of single-server and multi-server DBMSs are proposed. These concepts focus fine-grained adaptation of DBMS architectures and are realized through asynchronous programming models. These programming models decouple the implementation of DBMS components from fine-grained architectural optimization. Thereby, optimizers can derive novel architectures better fitting individual DBMS components, leading to high and robust DBMS performance under changing conditions.