2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Abstract
Pp. 213–228 of the Proceedings
Understanding and Validating Database System Administration
Fábio Oliveira, Kiran Nagaraja, Rekha Bachwani, Ricardo Bianchini, Richard P. Martin, and Thu D. Nguyen, Rutgers University
Abstract
A large number of enterprises need their commodity database systems to
remain available at all times. Although administrator mistakes are a
significant source of unavailability and cost in these systems, no
study to date has sought to quantify the frequency of mistakes in the
field, understand the context in which they occur, or develop system
support to deal with them explicitly. In this paper, we first
characterize the typical administrator tasks, testing environments,
and mistakes using results from an extensive survey we have conducted
of 51 experienced administrators. Given the results of this survey,
we next propose system support to validate administrator actions
before they are made visible to users. Our prototype implementation
creates a validation environment that is an extension of a replicated
database system, where administrator actions can be validated using
real workloads. The prototype implements three forms of validation,
including a novel form in which the behavior of a database replica can
be validated even without an example of correct behavior for
comparison. Our results show that the prototype can detect the major
classes of administrator mistakes.
- View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF. Listen to the presentation in MP3 format.
Until June 2007, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2006 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
|
