Shared Context for Improving Collaboration in Database Administration

Abstract

Database administrators (DBAs) and experts face a large spectrum of procedures in order to ensure the ongoing operational functionality and efficiency of their organization's databases and the applications that access those databases. Unfortunately, these procedures cannot be used directly in a multitude of specific situations and contexts. To deal with situation specificity and contexts at hand, DBAs often cooperate with different actors such as developers, system administrators, data administrators, end users, etc. However, communication processes are often complex because (1) actors come from different domains different from DBA’s domain (e.g. Business user) (2) the context in which a database activity (e.g. incident solving) occurs may not be shared and understood in the same way by all actors. The paper presents how to make shared context explicit in a cooperative work and an analysis of the cooperative work from the viewpoint of one the actors. Making context explicit is possible through a formalism allowing a uniform representation of elements of knowledge, reasoning and contexts, like Contextual-Graphs formalism. Currently, we are developing an experience base that will be used by a system to support DBAs.