Synergy-based Workload Management

Workload management aims at the efficient execution of queries on a database. In this context, scheduling plays a crucial role. A vast number of scheduling approaches have been developed, most of them belonging to one of two categories: analysis and monitoring. However, they mainly either focus only on one possible kind of impact of queries on each other’s execution time, or require an offline phase for information gathering. In contrast, the approach we pursue does not require any offline phase and flexibly adapts to any database system or hardware configuration. It bases on the fact that the multiple requests that are executed concurrently in a database for performance purposes may have a positive impact on the execution of each other, e.g. due to caching or complementary resource consumption, or impede each other’s execution, e.g. in the case of resource contention. Both kinds of impacts are reflected by the execution time of the workload. We apply a monitoring approach to derive those impacts – called synergies – between request types fully automated at runtime from measured execution times. Thereby, our approach works completely independent from changing synergies or configurations and easily handles new query types.