Microsoft Index Tuning Wizard for SQL Server 7.0
Surajit Chaudhuri (Microsoft Research)
Vivek Narasayya (Microsoft Research)
Enterprise-class databases require database administrators who are responsible
for performance tuning. With large-scale deployment of databases, minimizing
database administration function becomes important. One important task of a
database administrator is selecting indexes that are appropriate for the
workload on the system. In data intensive applications such as decision support
and data warehousing picking the right set of indexes becomes crucial for
performance. Moreover, the indexes chosen should track changes in the workload.
While automating the process of index selection can greatly reduce
administration cost, enterprise databases are simply too complex for the
administrator to hit the "accept" button on the recommendations of an index
selection tool without doing a quantitative impact analysis of the recommendations.
We have developed an index tuning wizard at Microsoft Research that
(a) automates the task of picking the right set of indexes for a database
and workload, and (b) supports the ability to perform impact analysis of
index recommendations. We will demonstrate this tool running on
Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 (Sphinx).