I'd rather play golf

August 29, 2011 marks the date for the 3rd TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking, co-located with the 37th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB) which will be held in Seattle, Washington from August 29th through September 3 at the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle. TPCTC 2011 is organized again this year [...]

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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. [...]

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Inevitably, at some point performance becomes an issue for many database applications. Performance analysis is often problematic simply because there are so many variables, which include the characteristics of the hardware, the workload, physical database design, and application design, and because these considerations have tradeoffs and side-effects – there are usually no right answers. Some [...]

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In the context of a database management system like SQL Anywhere, what system behaviours constitute robustness? The concept, at least, sounds very simple. This past week I attended a workshop on Robust Query Processing being held at the Dagstuhl conference center in Wadern, Germany, to discuss this very subject, and all of its nuances. The [...]

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“Infinity always gives me vertigo” is a line from the song “Mystery” by well-known Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn – it’s found on his 2006 album Life Short Call Now. It’s a catchy phrase, and an appropriate lead-in to discussing the term scalability. In particular, the term infinite scalability. Recently I’ve been seeing the use of [...]

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This past Thursday I had the opportunity to listen to Peter F. Sweeney of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory as he spoke on “The Poor State of Experimental Evaluation of Software and Systems in Computer Science” during a lecture at the University of Waterloo. Here’s Peter’s abstract: As hardware and software continues to [...]

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Third International Workshop on Testing Database Systems (DBTest 2010) June 7, 2010, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA In conjunction with the 2010 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference Workshop Overview New usage patterns, evolving hardware trends, and increased competition drive continuous innovation and expansion of data-processing systems. Commercial database vendors are adding new features related to ease of management, semistructured [...]

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Raghunath Nambiar of HP Labs sent an email to me this morning about the forthcoming Second TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking, which will be co-located with the 2010 VLDB Conference in Singapore this September. This is the second TPCTC workshop, that follows a successful 2009 workshop in France last summer. The papers [...]

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In the past few weeks I’ve witnessed a number of published performance analyses, both with and without SQL Anywhere. By and large these “benchmarks” have been exceedingly simplistic, which is unsurprising since a simple benchmark requires significantly less development effort than a complex one. Performance analyses I see frequently, for example, involve (simply) inserting a [...]

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This past Saturday, ORM toolkit provider X-tensive.com announced ORMBattle.Net, “The ORM Tool Shootout”. What X-tensive has done is they’ve created a “benchmark” to test the efficiency of various ORM toolkit implementations, and then published the results, comparing Microsoft’s Entity Framework, Lightspeed, LLBLGenPro, NHibernate, OpenAccess, and Subsonic with X-tensive’s own ORM toolkit, DataObjects.Net. Unsurprisingly, the performance [...]

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