Self-Tuning Database Systems: The AutoAdmin Experience

Surajit Chaudhuri
Microsoft Research

Abstract

In late 1996, we started the AutoAdmin project in Microsoft Research with the dream of working towards self-tuning database systems. The results from the project led to index tuning wizard component in Microsoft SQL Server and helps automate physical database design. In this talk, we talk about our approach, summarize our experience, and also reflect on long term challenges that we face as an industry in realizing the dream of self-tuning database systems. In addition, I will also provide an overview of our research group and describe a couple of other projects that we are working on.

Surajit Chaudhuri is a senior researcher and leads the Data Management, Exploration and Mining Group at Microsoft Research http://research.microsoft/dmx. The group is pursuing projects in self-tuning database systems (with a focus on automated physical database design), approximate query processing, data cleaning, and query environments over relational and text data. His work on self-tuning database technology and data mining has been incorporated in the Index Tuning Wizard and Analysis server components of Microsoft SQL Server. He is on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Database Systems and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Surajit did his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Against his manager's advice, Surajit continues to work on the Microsoft Conference Management Tool that he had built for automating conference management that has now been used by several academic conferences including ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGKDD.