PolePosition

the open source database benchmark
http://www.polepos.org
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Content


About

PolePosition is a benchmark test suite to compare database engines and object-relational mapping technology. It is by no means complete. Database vendors and open source database project contributors are invited to improve the test implementations and to write further scenarios ("Circuits"). The PolePosition framework will help to implement tests quickly and to time and output the results as number series and graph visualizations.

The authors of the current test implementations do not see themselves as experts for SQL, JDO, JPA, Hibernate or Datanucleus. If you can provide a faster implementation for a circuit, please supply it to the PolePosition project.

The results show that there can not be one single "best product". Depending on your application, some circuit results may be very important for you and some may be irrelevant. If you consider basing your choice of database on this benchmark, download the sources and bring along time to look at what every circuit does.


Results

We provide sample results from two different runs as PDF files:

Embedded Results
Database setups with low resource consumption and low administration costs, for instance for (mobile) devices.

Client/Server Results
Database setups with client/server functionality for scalable applications.

An explanation about each benchmark scenario ("Circuit") and what it does can be found here.

You are encouraged to download the PolePosition suite and to run the tests yourself with your favourite databases on your hardware, see Running the tests. If you are evaluating databases for a concrete scenario, the best thing you can do is to write your own customized circuit for this use case.


Interpretation

As already expressed above, there is no best product. The importance of individual results will depend on the respective application. However we think that we can draw some general conclusions from the results that may be valid for everyone:


Download

All sources of the PolePosition test suite including some open source database engines to run tests are available for download here.


Running the tests

We recommend you to use the Eclipse IDE to work with the test source code. The distribution contains a .project file for Eclipse to get you started quickly.

The full test suite with all engines takes a full night to run on a fast machine. Before your first run you may like to take a look at the configuration possibilities, so you can first check that all configured databases run through successfully.

Changing org.polepos.Settings.DEBUG to true will run all benchmarks with less objects.

The main class to start the PolePosition suite is org.polepos.RunSeasonAfterEnhancing..
To run with all engines in one go, you need quite a lot of RAM. We ran with -Xmx1500m

Here are the most important files, that you may want to customize:


Source Code

What you may want to look for:


License

PolePosition source code is supplied under the GPL.