A lightweight physical design alerter can analyze a workload and determine whether a comprehensive tuning session would result in a configuration improvement over the current configuration. The alerter provides a low-overhead procedure that can run during normal operation of a database management system and produce a notification if a current configuration is less than optimal. The alerter can report lower and upper bounds on the improvements that could be obtained if a comprehensive tuning tool is launched. A lower bound can be justified by generating feasible configurations. The disclosed embodiments can be extended to query updates, materialized views, and other physical design features (e.g., partitioning).