Design and Implementation of a DBMS Performance Assessment Tool

The increasing number of advanced database management systems offered on the market requires tools to quickly assess their performance and to assure their quality. Performance measurement involves running a set of representative workloads, such as benchmarks, and quality assurance, which involves extensive testing. The Software Testpilot described in this paper greatly simplifies both jobs by enabling a compact specification of the workload search space, a flexible mechanism to interact with a system under study, and a fast algorithm to expose the performance bottlenecks or software instabilities.