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New England Database
Society sponsored by Sun Microsystems |
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NEDS |
It's the PEOPLE, Stupid! - Self-Managing Research at IBM Almaden
Guy M. Lohman
IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose, CA
Friday, September 30, 2005, 4:00
PM
Volen 101, Brandeis
University
(preceded by a wine and cheese reception at 3:00 pm)
Abstract:
In the beginning, computers cost millions of dollars and had
very limited capacity and performance, so we could justify surrounding them with
legions of relatively cheap minions who slaved to squeeze every ounce of
utilization out of these precious resources. Today, the opposite is true. CPUs
cost less than a good meal for four, the smallest disk holds more data than most
people amass in a lifetime, and the overabundance of communication bandwidth
make non-stop surfing and chatting a worldwide pastime. Competitive pressures
are also pushing down the price of software, even as it becomes more complex to
develop and maintain. Yet the cost of skilled talent to develop and manage IT
systems is not going down significantly ("off-shoring" notwithstanding). Hence
the people costs of IT systems will increasingly dominate the Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) of all IT systems. In a world of ubiquitous hardware and
interconnection, systems must worry much more about
manageability, operability, reliability, and extensibility (MORE) than
performance, the primary focus of Computer Science for its first half century.
This talk highlights some of the contributions we have made to self-managing
systems, particularly in the DB2 database product, as part of an IBM-wide
initiative to make all its systems more "autonomic", i.e. self-managing.
Specifically, our work has leveraged and extended relational query optimization
in DB2 in a number of ways, by exploiting the optimizer's model
to evaluate alternative physical database designs and by self-validating that
model via the LEarning Optimizer (LEO). More recently, we have begun to
investigate ways to exploit data mining and knowledge bases to aid problem
determination, a prerequisite to the very challenging problem of autonomic
self-healing. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the
research challenges that self-managing systems present.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Guy M. Lohman is Manager of Advanced Optimization in the Advanced Database Solutions Department at IBM Research Division's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and has 22 years of experience in relational query optimization. He is the architect of the Optimizer of the DB2 Universal Data Base (UDB) for Linux, Unix, and Windows, and was responsible for its development from 1992 to 1997 (Versions 2 - 5), as well as the invention and prototyping of Visual Explain to display Optimizer plans. During that period, Dr. Lohman also managed the overall effort to incorporate into the DB2 UDB product the Starburst compiler technology that was invented and prototyped at the Almaden Research Center. More recently, he was a co-inventor and designer of the DB2 Index Advisor (now called Design Advisor), and co-founder of the DB2 Autonomic Computing project (formerly known as SMART -- Self-Managing And Resource Tuning), part of IBM's company-wide Autonomic Computing initiative. In 2002, Dr. Lohman was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology. His current research interests involve self-managing database systems, problem determination, and query optimization.
Maintained by Dina Goldin dqg AT cse.uconn.edu