Testing the Quality of a Query Optimizer.
Michael Stillger, Johann Christoph Freytag · 1995
Today, database technology is used in many different application areas. Therefore, the need to understand how well a particular database management system (DBMS) suits the requirements of a given application has become an important task. One way to address this need is to provide means to measure and to verify the quality of a database management system and its query optimizer. Additionally, since database implementors continue to improve the query optimizer of their specific systems, it becomes especially important for them and the users of those systems to evaluate those changes on a large scale. In particular, changes of the optimizer must be understood by both groups of people. Individual test environments or standardized benchmarks are commonly used to evaluate the quality of an optimizer. Almost all of them are only suited for a particular, artificial database schema and lack the flexibility of determining the size and the shape of queries to be tested and the database to be used...