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Benchmarking

Overview
Relational Database system has been very popular. DBMS is a complex and expensive software system. Before investing so much amount of money on any database system any consumer should do a research on the database system. Performance is a very important consideration. Different database systems have their own specialty; for example some are designed to run complex queries while other might be capable of running more transactions. In order to help the consumer to choose a database system which best suite their requirement many database benchmarks have been developed.
What is benchmarking?
The Webster dictionary defines benchmarks as:(1) usually benchmark: “a mark on a permanent object indicating elevation and serving as a reference in topographic surveys and tidal observations” (2) a): “a point of reference from which measurements may be made (b): something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged c): a standardized problem or test that serves as a basis for evaluation or comparison (as of computer system performance).” So benchmarking is a reference for comparing the performance with other machine. If we have to rate the automobile speed then we could simply measure the maximum speed of an automobile, but when it comes to computer its very hard.
The best way in measuring the computer performance will be to measure the performance of the application on that system, but this is not always feasible because it might be costly to put that system and measure the performance. Sometime it might not be possible at all; sometime we need to estimate the performance of non- existent program.
After looking all these, the notion of benchmark program were developed. There are many benchmarks program developed over the period of time. Different kinds of benchmarks program have been developed to measure the performance of different kinds of computer system in different application domains. This...

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