Abstract: The cost of ownership of any commercial database system is significant. The AutoAdmin project at Microsoft Research was started in late 1996 (well before the term Autonomic Computing became fashionable) to develop techniques to reduce the overhead of database administration. Our goal was to make it easier to monitor the server and develop self-tuning techniques for performance management. The technology from this project has been incorporated in the Database Tuning Advisor tool in upcoming SQL Server 2005 release (and earlier as Index Tuning Wizard in SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000). This talk will take a look at some of the past research results and discuss challenges and opportunities in self-tuning DBMS research.

Short Bio: Surajit Chaudhuri is a Senior Researcher and leads the Data Management and Exploration Group at Microsoft Research. His areas of interest include self-tuning database systems, query optimization, data cleaning and other tools for data integration, understanding synergy between IR and DBMS. As his work outside of work, he led the development of CMT, the conference management service hosted by Microsoft Research since 1999 for the academic community. Surajit has a PhD from Stanford University.