storage workload estimation for database management systems
Modern storage systems are sophisticated. Simple direct-attached storage devices are giving way to storage systems that are shared, flexible, virtualized and network-attached. Today, storage systems have their own administrators, who use specialized tools and expertise to configure and manage storage resources. Although the separation of storage management and database management has many advantages, it also introduces problems. Database physical design and storage configuration are closely related tasks, and the separation makes it more difficult to achieve a good end-to-end design. In this paper, we attempt to close this gap by addressing the problem of predicting the storage workload that will be generated by a database management system. Specifically, we show how to translate a database workload description, together with a database physical design, into a characterization of the storage workload that will result. Such a characterization can be used by a storage administrator to guide storage configuration. The ultimate goal of this work is to enable effective end-to-end design and configuration spanning both the database and storage system tiers. We present an empirical assessment of the cost of workload prediction as well as the accuracy of the result.
database management systems storage management storage configuration workload characterization