Towards Self-Managing Databases Tomas Talius, Principal Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation

Database Mgmt Work Continuum Bare metal provisioning: Hardware/specs OS & its patches Database software deployment: DBMS & patches HA/DR Backup strategy Upgrade testing Monitoring Compliance/security Repeat this for all environments; production & test

Database Mgmt Continuum (2) Capacity planning Change management Application specific work: Development support Performance analysis and tuning Troubleshooting & fire-fighting How much of the work is application or business problem specific?

Database As A Service DaaS should address to common tasks (i.e. tax) shared by all DBAs HW deployment and monitoring SW deployment and patching Local HA, DR, Backup retention & HA Load balancing & elasticity Upgrade/compat guarantees Cheap to operate at scale using 9-5 working hours; no pagers for routine failures Cloud systems (e.g. SQL Azure) solve this today Security, audit and compliance Painful and complicated to do it right

DBA Role in Daas Enable DBAs to focus on higher value work: Self-service DBA to specify policies to the system; both for the system and an application Focus on logical administration Work requiring specific knowledge of the application Things where automatic guessing is complicated (index tuning) Keep the existing tools and investments; do not reinvent the familiar models