Overview
There are many new serving databases available, including:
It is difficult to decide which system is right for your application, partially because the features differ between
systems, and partially because there is not an easy way to compare the performance of one system versus another.
The goal of the YCSB project is to develop a framework and common set of workloads for evaluating the performance of
different "key-value" and "cloud" serving stores. The project comprises two things:
- The YCSB Client, an extensible workload generator
- The Core workloads, a set of workload scenarios to be executed by the generator
Although the core workloads provide a well rounded picture of a system's performance, the Client is extensible so that
you can define new and different workloads to examine system aspects, or application scenarios, not adequately covered by
the core workload. Similarly, the Client is extensible to support benchmarking different databases. Although we include
sample code for benchmarking HBase and Cassandra, it is straightforward to write a new interface layer to benchmark
your favorite database.
A common use of the tool is to benchmark multiple systems and compare them. For example, you can install multiple systems
on the same hardward configuration, and run the same workloads against each system. Then you can plot the performance
of each system (for example, as latency versus throughput curves) to see when one system does better than another.