Network management operations are complicated, tedious and error-prone, requiring significant human involvement and expert knowledge. In this paper, we first examine the fundamental components of management operations and argue that the lack of automation is due to a lack of programmability at the right level of abstraction. To address this challenge, we present DECOR, a database-oriented, declarative framework towards automated network management. DECOR models router configuration and any

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... ic network status as relational data in a conceptually centralized database. As such, network management operations can be represented as a series of transactional database queries, which provide the benefit of atomicity, consistency and isolation. The rulebased language in DECOR provides the flexible programmability to specify and enforce network-wide management constraints, and achieve high-level task scheduling. We describe the design rationale and architecture of DECOR and present some preliminary examples applying our approach to common network management tasks.