Database configuration can be a daunting task as database administrators are often presented with a myriad of configuration options that are difficult to sift through. Prato, a project at HP Labs, is a prototype of a self-managing DBMS service provider that eases this burden by using economic incentives to guide automated DBMS setup and management. Prato offers customers private, virtual, DBMS appliances that can each be sized up to several hundred nodes, and made available on demand, in just a few minutes.
Citation:
Soila Pertet, Priya Narasimhan, John Wilkes, Jay J. Wylie, "Prato: Databases on Demand," icac, pp.11, Fourth International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC'07), 2007