XWeB: the XML Warehouse Benchmark

TL;DR

XWeB is a benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of XML data warehouses supporting OLAP operations, filling a gap in existing decision support benchmarks by incorporating XML-specific features.

Contribution

It introduces the first XML-specific decision support benchmark derived from TPC-H, including a reference model, test data, and workload for XML warehouses.

Findings

Demonstrates the applicability of XWeB on various XML DBMSs.

Provides insights into performance bottlenecks for XML data warehouses.

Establishes a standard for evaluating XML decision support systems.

Abstract

With the emergence of XML as a standard for representing business data, new decision support applications are being developed. These XML data warehouses aim at supporting On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) operations that manipulate irregular XML data. To ensure feasibility of these new tools, important performance issues must be addressed. Performance is customarily assessed with the help of benchmarks. However, decision support benchmarks do not currently support XML features. In this paper, we introduce the XML Warehouse Benchmark (XWeB), which aims at filling this gap. XWeB derives from the relational decision support benchmark TPC-H. It is mainly composed of a test data warehouse that is based on a unified reference model for XML warehouses and that features XML-specific structures, and its associate XQuery decision support workload. XWeB's usage is illustrated by experiments on several XML database management systems.