Dependability Benchmarking for OLTP Systems

On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems are the core of the information systems that support the daily operations of organizations. The nonexistence of a practical way to evaluate dependability attributes, typically leads systems administrators to concentrate on performance tuning and neglect the aspects related to dependability. Transactional systems industry holds a well-established infrastructure for performance evaluation, where the benchmarks from the Transactional Performance Processing Council (TPC) represent the most successful benchmarking initiative of all computer industry. However, as performance evaluation has been the main focus, there are no dependability benchmarks for OLTP systems. This book addresses the dependability benchmarking problem and presents the DBench-OLTP benchmark. This benchmark specifies the measures and all components required to evaluate and compare performance and dependability in typical transactional systems. The use of DBench-OLTP is demonstrated through the evaluation and comparison of several systems that represent real alternatives for typical transactional environments, such as many e-commerce applications.