DBTEST 2011 was held on Monday, one of the co-located workshops of the 2011 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Athens, Greece and co-chaired by Ken Salem of the University of Waterloo and Goetz Graefe of HP Labs.
The workshop’s program featured eight short papers along with my keynote talk which I entitled The Peril of Complexity. Two of the papers [1,2] were co-authored by my colleagues, Ivan Bowman and Ani Nica. Ivan and Mumtaz Ahmad published their work on multi-tenancy workload analysis, developed during Mumtaz’s internship with our team during the fall of 2010. Ani, along with five other attendees of last October’s Dagstuhl workshop on Robust Query Processing and led by Martin Kersten of CWI, authored a paper that described a benchmark proposal to assess query processing robustness based on the metaphor of a “tractor pull”.
In addition to these two papers, others that I enjoyed included work by Florian Waas of Greenplum who presented Plan space analysis: an early warning system to detect plan regressions in cost-based optimizers, a novel way to test regressions that is independent of the search space technique utilized by the query optimizer. You can find a link to the paper on Florian’s web site. Another interesting paper, entitled The Mixed Workload CH-benCHmark, was presented by Alfons Kemper of TU Munchen. The paper describes some initial steps towards a combined TPC-C and TPC-H-like benchmark for mixed workloads.
In my view, DBTEST 2011 was a successful workshop, with some interesting discussion amongst the roughly 35 participants. It remains to be seen if the workshop will maintain the support necessary to continue in subsequent years, but there is no question that the study of testing database systems is both challenging and worthwhile.
[1] Mumtaz Ahmad and Ivan T. Bowman (2011). Predicting System Performance for Multi-tenant Database Workloads. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Testing Database Systems, Athens, Greece.
[2] Martin L. Kersten, Alfons Kemper, Volker Markl, Anisoara Nica, Meikel Poess, and Kai-Uwe Sattler (2011). Tractor Pulling on Data Warehouses. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Testing Database Systems, Athens, Greece.
Glenn Paulley is a Director of Engineering at Sybase iAnywhere.
