A visual database management tool: the design of a semi-intelligent DBA tool for a relational DBMS

The need for, as well as the design and implementation of a visual storage management tool to be used by a database administrator (DBA) of an Oracle RDBMS are examined, articulated and discussed. The problems that a DBA is likely to encounter in practice as a result of often inadequate support by many RDBMSs are also considered. Our proposed visual `DBATool´ affords various functionalities and provides the DBA with a facility for monitoring storage utilisation by visually displaying a map of the disk space. It also exhibits some degree of intelligence, which is achieved by keeping track of the `temporal´ trail of the disk storage utilisation. The tool uses this trail to predict the expected date of occurrence of potential problems in order to avoid their possible disruptive impact