Database Tuning Advisor (DTA) is a physical database design tool that is part of Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 relational database management system. Previously known as "Index Tuning Wizard" in SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000, DTA adds new functionality that is not available in other contemporary physical design tuning tools. Novel aspects of DTA that will be demonstrated include: (a) Ability to take into account both performance and manageability requirements of DBAs (b) Fully integrated recommendations for indexes, materialized views and horizontal partitioning (c) Transparently leverage a test server to offload tuning load from production server and (d) Easy programmability and scriptability.

TPC-DS is a new decision support benchmark currently under development by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). This paper provides a brief overview of the new benchmark. The benchmark models the decision support functions of a retail product supplier, including data loading, multiple types of queries and data maintenance. The database consists of multiple snowflake schemas with shared dimension tables; data is skewed; and the query set is large. Overall, the benchmark is considerably more realistic than previous decision support benchmarks.