Characterizing database user's access patterns

Much work has been done on characterizing the workload of a database system. Previous studies focused on providing different types of statistical summaries, and modeling the run-time behavior on the physical resource level. In this paper, we focus on characterizing the database system's workload from the view of database users. We use user access patterns to describe how a client application or a group of users accesses the data of a database system. The user access patterns include a set of user access events that represent the format of the queries and a set of user access graphs that represent the query execution orders. User access patterns can help database administrators tune the system, help database users optimize queries, and help to predict and cache future queries. In this paper, we present several approaches to using user access patterns to improve system performance, and report some experimental results.