Automatic configuration of the Cassandra database using irace

• Published in: PeerJ. Computer science Vol. 7; p. e634
• Main Authors: Silva-Muñoz, Moisés, Franzin, Alberto, Bersini, Hugues
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States PeerJ. Ltd 05.08.2021; PeerJ, Inc; PeerJ Inc
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Automatic configuration; Cassandra; Configurations; Configurations (Computers); Data Mining and Machine Learning; Data processing; Database administration; Design of experiments; Hyperparameter tuning; Machine learning; Methods; Optimization; Parameter tuning; Parameters; Performance evaluation; Software; Statistical methods; Statistical models; Workloads; United States; Databases; Automatic configuration; Parameter tuning; Cassandra; Hyperparameter tuning
• ISSN: 2376-5992; 2376-5992
• DOI: 10.7717/peerj-cs.634

Database systems play a central role in modern data-centered applications. Their performance is thus a key factor in the efficiency of data processing pipelines. Modern database systems expose several parameters that users and database administrators can configure to tailor the database settings to the specific application considered. While this task has traditionally been performed manually, in the last years several methods have been proposed to automatically find the best parameter configuration for a database. Many of these methods, however, use statistical models that require high amounts of data and fail to represent all the factors that impact the performance of a database, or implement complex algorithmic solutions. In this work we study the potential of a simple model-free general-purpose configuration tool to automatically find the best parameter configuration of a database. We use the irace configurator to automatically find the best parameter configuration for the Cassandra NoSQL database using the YCBS benchmark under different scenarios. We establish a reliable experimental setup and obtain speedups of up to 30% over the default configuration in terms of throughput, and we provide an analysis of the configurations obtained.