A Versatile Framework for Painless Benchmarking of Database Management Systems

Abstract

Benchmarking is a crucial aspect of evaluating database management systems. Researchers, developers, and users utilise industry-standard benchmarks to assist with their research, development, or purchase decisions, respectively. Despite this ubiquity, benchmarking is usually a difficult process involving laborious tasks such as writing and debugging custom testbed scripts, or extracting and transforming output into useful formats. To date, there are only a limited number of comprehensive benchmarking frameworks designed to tackle these usability and efficiency challenges directly.

In this paper we propose a new versatile benchmarking framework. Our design, not yet implemented, is based on exploration of the benchmarking practices of individuals in the database community. Through user interviews, we identify major pain points these people encountered during benchmarking, and map these onto a pipeline of processes representative of a typical benchmarking workflow. We explain how our proposed framework would target each process in this pipeline, potentiating significant overall usability and efficiency improvements. We also contrast the responses of engineers working in industry with those of researchers, and examine how database benchmarking requirements differ between these two groups. The framework we propose is based around traditional synthetic workloads, would be simple to configure, highly extensible, could support any benchmark, and write output to any well-defined data format. It would collect and track all generated events, data, and relationships from the benchmark and underlying systems, and offer simple reproducibility. Complex scenarios such as distributed-client and multi-tenant benchmarks would be simplified by the framework’s workload partitioning, client coordination, and output collation capabilities.