Generating thousand benchmark queries in seconds

• Authors: Meikel Poess;John M. Stephens, Jr.
• Venue: VLDB '04 Proceedings of the Thirtieth international conference on Very large data bases - Volume 30
• Year: 2004

The combination of an exponential growth in the amount of data managed by a typical business intelligence system and the increased competitiveness of a global economy has propelled decision support systems (DSS) from the role of exploratory tools employed by a few visionary companies to become a core requirement for a competitive enterprise. That same maturation has often resulted in a selection process that requires an ever more critical system evaluation and selection to be completed in an increasingly short period of time. While there have been some advances in the generation of data sets for system evaluation (see [3]), the quantification of query performance has often relied on models and methodologies that were developed for systems that were more simplistic, less dynamic, and less central to a successful business. In this paper we present QGEN, a flexible, high-level query generator optimized for decision support system evaluation. QGEN is able to generate arbitrary query sets, which conform to a selected statistical profile without requiring that the queries be statically defined or disclosed prior to testing. Its novel design links query syntax with abstracted data distributions, enabling users to parameterize their query workload to match an emerging access pattern or data set modification. This results in query sets that retain comparability for system comparisons while reflecting the inherent dynamism of operational systems, and which provide a broad range of syntactic and semantic coverage, while remaining focused on appropriate commonalities within a particular evaluation process or business segment.