  Database administrators (DBAs) play an important role in managing,
maintaining and optimizing database systems. However, it is hard and tedious
for DBAs to manage a large number of databases and give timely response
(waiting for hours is intolerable in many online cases). In addition, existing
empirical methods only support limited diagnosis scenarios, which are also
labor-intensive to update the diagnosis rules for database version updates.
Recently large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in various
fields. Thus, we propose D-Bot, an LLM-based database diagnosis system that can
automatically acquire knowledge from diagnosis documents, and generate
reasonable and well-founded diagnosis report (i.e., identifying the root causes
and solutions) within acceptable time (e.g., under 10 minutes compared to hours
by a DBA). The techniques in D-Bot include (i) offline knowledge extraction
from documents, (ii) automatic prompt generation (e.g., knowledge matching,
tool retrieval), (iii) root cause analysis using tree search algorithm, and
(iv) collaborative mechanism for complex anomalies with multiple root causes.
We verify D-Bot on real benchmarks (including 539 anomalies of six typical
applications), and the results show that D-Bot can effectively analyze the root
causes of unseen anomalies and significantly outperforms traditional methods
and vanilla models like GPT-4.
