Predicting cost amortization for query services

Emerging providers of online services offer access to data collections. Such data service providers need to build data structures, e.g. materialized views and indexes, in order to offer better performance for user query execution. The cost of such structures is charged to the user as part of the overall query service cost. In order to ensure the economic viability of the provider, the building and maintenance cost of new structures has to be amortized to a set of prospective query services that will use them. This work proposes a novel stochastic model that predicts the extent of cost amortization in time and number of services. The model is completed with a novel method that regresses query traffic statistics and provides input to the prediction model. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the prediction model, we study its application on an extension of an existing economy model for the management of a cloud DBMS. A thorough experimental study shows that the prediction model ensures the economic viability of the cloud DBMS while enabling the offer of fast and cheap query services. © 2011 ACM.