Object operations benchmark

Abstract

Performance is a major issue in the acceptance of object-oriented and relational database systems aimed at engineering applications such as computer-aided software engineering (CASE) and computer-aided design (CAD). Because traditional database systems benchmarks are inapproriate to measure performance for operations on engineering objects, we designed a new benchmark Object Operations version 1 (OO1) to focus on important characteristics of these applications. OO1 is descended from an earlier benchmark for simple database operations and is based on several years experience with that benchmark. In this paper we describe the OO1 benchmark and results we obtained running it on a variety of database systems. We provide a careful specification of the benchmark, show how it can be implemented on database systems, and present evidence that more than an order of magnitude difference in performance can result from a DBMS implementation quite different from current products; minimizing overhead per database call, offloading database server functionality to workstations, taking advantage of large main memories, and using link-based methods.