Make your database system dream of electric sheep

Database management systems (DBMSs) are notoriously difficult to deploy and administer. Self-driving DBMSs seek to remove these impediments by managing themselves automatically. Despite decades of DBMS auto-tuning research, a truly autonomous, self-driving DBMS is yet to come. But recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) have moved this goal closer. Given this, we present a system implementation treatise towards achieving a self-driving DBMS. We first provide an overview of the NoisePage self-driving DBMS that uses ML to predict the DBMS's behavior and optimize itself without human support or guidance. The system's architecture has three main ML-based components: (1) workload forecasting, (2) behavior modeling, and (3) action planning. We then describe the system design principles to facilitate holistic autonomous operations. Such prescripts reduce the complexity of the problem, thereby enabling a DBMS to converge to a better and more stable configuration more quickly.