Lubor J. Kollar

Database Tuning Advisor for Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of Database Tuning Advisors (DTAs) novel functionality, the rationale for its architecture, and demonstrates DTAs quality and scalability on large customer workloads. The DTA is part of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. It is an automated physical database design tool that significantly advances the state-of-the-art in several ways. First, the DTA is capable of providing an integrated physical design recommendation for horizontal partitioning, indexes, and materialized views. Second, unlike todays physical design tools that focus solely on performance, the DTA also supports the capability for a database administrator (DBA) to specify manageability requirements while optimizing for performance. Third, the DTA is able to scale to large databases and workloads using several novel techniques including: workload compression, reduced statistics creation, and exploiting test server to reduce load on production server. Finally, the DTA greatly enhances scriptability and customization through the use of a public XML schema for input and output.

TPC-DS, taking decision support benchmarking to the next level

TPC-DS is a new decision support benchmark currently under development by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). This paper provides a brief overview of the new benchmark. The benchmark models the decision support functions of a retail product supplier, including data loading, multiple types of queries and data maintenance. The database consists of multiple snowflake schemas with shared dimension tables; data is skewed; and the query set is large. Overall, the benchmark is considerably more realistic than previous decision support benchmarks.