Tractor pulling on data warehouses

Robustness of database systems under stress is hard to quantify, because there are many factors involved, most notably the user expectation to perform a job within certain bounds of the user requirements. Nevertheless, robustness of database system is very important to end users. In this paper we develop a database benchmark suite, inspired by tractor pulling, where robustness is measured as a system's ability to process data despite a continuous increase in system load, as defined in terms of data volume, query volume and complexity. A functional evaluation is performed against several systems to highlight the benchmark capabilities.