Benchmarking in-memory database

We have witnessed exciting development of RAM technology in the past decade. The memory size grows rapidly and the price continues to decrease, so that it is feasible to deploy large amounts of RAM in a computer system. Several companies and research institutions have devoted a lot of resources to develop in-memory databases (IMDB) that implement queries after loading data into (virtual) memory in advance. The bloom of various in-memory databases pursues us to test and evaluate their performance objectively and fairly. Although the existing database benchmarks like Wisconsin benchmark and TPC-X series have achieved great success, they cannot suit for in-memory databases due to the lack of consideration of unique characteristics of an IMDB. In this study, we propose MemTest, a novel benchmark that concerns some major characteristics of an in-memory database. This benchmark constructs particular metrics, which cover processing time, compression ratio, minimal memory space and column strength of an in-memory database. We design a data model based on inter-bank transaction applications, and a data generator to support uniform and skew data distributions. The MemTest workload includes a set of queries and transactions against the metrics and data model. Finally, we illustrate the efficacy of MemTest through the implementations on two different in-memory databases.