ADAM: An Autonomic Approach to Database Management

Abstract

In recent years, the emergence of the Internet has resulted in a proliferation of data. This in turn has given rise to increasing demands of organizations to access accurate information swiftly and efficiently. Thus, the scope of functions for databases has expanded more than ever and the complexity of database systems has grown accordingly. Consequently, the burden on database administrators (DBAs) has increased significantly. The objective of this research is to address and propose a solution to overcome this problem of overburdened and expensive DBAs. This chapter focuses on relational database management systems in particular and proposes a novel and innovative multiagent system (MAS) that would autonomously and rationally administer and maintain databases. The proposed multi-agent system tool, ADAM (a MAS for autonomous database administration and maintenance), is in the form of a self-administering wrapper around database systems and it addresses, and offers a solution to, the problem of overburdened and expensive DBAs with the objective of making databases a cost-effective option for small/medium-sized organizations. An implementation of the agent-based system to proactively or reactively identify and resolve a small subset of DBA tasks is discussed and the GAIA methodology is used to outline the detailed analysis and design of the same. Role models describing the responsibilities, permissions, activities, and protocols of the candidate agents, and interaction models representing the links between the roles are explained. The coordinated intelligent rational agent model is used to describe the agent architecture and a brief description of the functionalities, responsibilities, and components of each agent type in the ADAM multiagent system is presented. Finally, a prototype system implementation using JADE 2.5 and Oracle 8.1.7 is presented as evidence of the feasibility of the proposed agent-based solution for the autonomous administration and maintenance of relational databases.