DWEB: A Data Warehouse Engineering Benchmark

TL;DR

DWEB is a flexible, parameterized benchmark tool for generating synthetic data warehouses and workloads to evaluate and optimize data warehouse design choices.

Contribution

It introduces a tunable, fully parameterized benchmark generator that models various data warehouse schemas and workloads, addressing limitations of existing standards.

Findings

DWEB can generate diverse synthetic data warehouses.

It is easy to tune with two levels of parameters.

Implemented as Java free software for broad compatibility.

Abstract

Data warehouse architectural choices and optimization techniques are critical to decision support query performance. To facilitate these choices, the performance of the designed data warehouse must be assessed. This is usually done with the help of benchmarks, which can either help system users comparing the performances of different systems, or help system engineers testing the effect of various design choices. While the TPC standard decision support benchmarks address the first point, they are not tuneable enough to address the second one and fail to model different data warehouse schemas. By contrast, our Data Warehouse Engineering Benchmark (DWEB) allows to generate various ad-hoc synthetic data warehouses and workloads. DWEB is fully parameterized to fulfill data warehouse design needs. However, two levels of parameterization keep it relatively easy to tune. Finally, DWEB is implemented as a Java free software that can be interfaced with most existing relational database management systems. A sample usage of DWEB is also provided in this paper.