A practitioner's introduction to database performance benchmarks and measurements

Database performance benchmarks provide an important measure for the comparison of database management systems. This paper provides an introduction to performance benchmarks for centralised databases. The introduction includes benchmarks for transaction processing, such as DebitCredit, TPC-A and TPC-B, and benchmarks for decision support, such as the Wisconsin benchmark and its extension by Bull to a vendor benchmark, known as the Single-User Decision Support benchmark. An important contribution of this paper is a practitioner's perspective of the issues involved in performance measurement.