  In object-oriented or object-relational databases such as multimedia
databases or most XML databases, access patterns are not static, i.e.,
applications do not always access the same objects in the same order
repeatedly. However, this has been the way these databases and associated
optimisation techniques like clustering have been evaluated up to now. This
paper opens up research regarding this issue by proposing a dynamic object
evaluation framework (DOEF) that accomplishes access pattern change by defining
configurable styles of change. This preliminary prototype has been designed to
be open and fully extensible. To illustrate the capabilities of DOEF, we used
it to compare the performances of four state of the art dynamic clustering
algorithms. The results show that DOEF is indeed effective at determining the
adaptability of each dynamic clustering algorithm to changes in access pattern.
