Benchmarking for Transaction Processing Database Systems in Big Data Era

Benchmarking is an essential suite supporting development of database management systems. It runs a set of well defined data and workloads on a specific hardware configuration to gather the results to fill the measurements. It is used widely for evaluating new technology or comparing different systems so as to promote the progress of database systems. To date, under the requirement of data management, new databases are designed and issued for different application requirements. Most of the state-of-the-art benchmarks are also designed for specific types of applications. Based on our experiences, however, we argue that considering the characteristics of data or workloads in big data era, benchmarking transaction processing databases (TP) must put much effort for domain specific needs to reflet 4V properties (i.e. volume, velocity, variety and veracity). With the critical transaction processing requirements of new applications, we see an explosion of designing innovative scalable databases or new processing architecture on traditional databases dealing with high intensive transaction workloads, which are called SecKill and can saturate the traditional database systems by high workloads, for example “11 (Formula Presented) ” of Tmall, “ticket booking” during China Spring Festival and “Stock Exchange” applications. In this paper, we first analyze SecKill applications and the implementation logics, and also summarize and abstract the business model in details. Then, we propose a totally new benchmark called PeakBench for simulating SecKill applications, including workload characteristics definition, workload distribution simulating, and logics implementing. Additionally, we define new evaluation metrics for performance comparison among DBMSs under different implementation architecture from the micro- and macro- points of views. At last, we provide a package of tools for simulating and evaluating purpose.