Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Organizations of all sizes rely on databases for their operations. Databases provide for storage and querying ofinformation. Applications connect to databases using connectors called ""drivers"". Application performancedepends on the application code, database performance, and the efficiency of the drivers connecting them.There has been limited research and few commercial products that optimize driver performance and providevisibility to system administrators to detect issues, simplify configuration, and dynamically adapt to failures.Improved drivers would greatly reduce hardware and software costs for the application and database serversand significantly decrease costs related to administration and system maintenance.This proposal investigates various techniques for implementing intelligence into database drivers to increaseperformance and reduce costs. Specifically, applied research will be conducted on driver-side caching (toreduce the number of queries that must be processed by the database), dynamic configuration (to allow thedriver to adapt to changes or failures of the database), and visualization and analytics (to enable administratorsto track performance in real-time and optimize performance). These topics require exploratory research andthen benchmarking to determine suitability for commercial implementation, and are ideal for collaborativeresearch conducted by students and college researchers. The research results will help guide theimplementation of the next generation database driver being developed by the supporting organization and willsignificantly decrease the time to commercialization and increase the market acceptance of the new features.The benefit to Canada is a contribution to a new database driver product with a world-wide market andsubsequent growth of a Canadian technology company.