Experiment-driven System Management
              Shivnath Babu, Duke University

Experiment-driven management is an important piece of the system
administration puzzle that involves techniques to identify and collect
missing data required to perform administrative tasks. I will first
present the benefits that automated experiment-driven management
brings to several long-standing problems in databases and other
systems. I will then present iTuned, a tool that uses experiment-
driven management to recommend good settings for database
configuration parameters. Database systems have a large number of such
parameters to control memory distribution, I/O optimization, costing
of query plans, and other behavior. Regular users and even expert
database administrators struggle to tune these parameters for good
performance. Finally, I will introduce the .eX framework that provides
a domain-specific language for specifying the data needed for an
administrative task, and a run-time system that plans and conducts
experiments to collect the needed data automatically and efficiently.
.eX aims to make experiment-driven management accessible to a broad
class of users.