DB2 Design Advisor: Integrated Automatic Physical Database Design Daniel C. Zilio, Jun Rao, Sam Lightstone, Guy M. Lohman, Adam Storm, Christian Garcia-Arellano, and Scott Fadden   View Paper (PDF)   Return to INDUSTRIAL SESSION 4: AUTOMATIC TUNING IN COMMERCIAL DBMSS Abstract The DB2 Design Advisor in IBM DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) Version 8.2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows is a tool that, for a given workload, automatically recommends physical design features that are any subset of indexes, materialized query tables (also called materialized views), shared-nothing database partitionings, and multidimensional clustering of tables. Our work is the very first industrial-strength tool that covers the design of as many as four different features, a significant advance to existing tools, which support no more than just indexes and materialized views. Building such a tool is challenging, because of not only the large search space introduced by the interactions among features, but also the extensibility needed by the tool to support additional features in the future. We adopt a novel "hybrid" approach in the Design Advisor that allows us to take important interdependencies into account as well as to encapsulate design features as separate components to lower the reengineering cost. The Design Advisor also features a built-in module that automatically reduces the given workload, and therefore provides great scalability for the tool. Our experimental results demonstrate that our tool can quickly provide good physical design recommendations that satisfy users' requirements. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery