I have been looking into Percona (Percona Server with XtraDB - Percona Software), potentially for use as a surrogate for MySQL. Percona claims to be self tuning. What does it really mean to be self tuning for a database server, in the general sense? Apart from configuration parameters, such as the cache query size, there could also be some more complex tuning measures such as indexes and storage engines (use memory based storage engine for small but often used data).
How much awareness can be given to a database server for it to be self tuning? Surely there must be limits?
The need for self-tuning systems software arises from the increasing complexity of today's systems combined with the decreasing fraction of users willing or able to tune such systems themselves. and even personal computers purchased solely for word processing come with systems software that provides paging, mainframe modernization scheduling, window management, device management, and filesystem caching, all of which can be tuned for better performance
Thank you for your response and seems plagiarised from Self-Tuning Systems Software
The question regards database servers though.