  Performance evaluation is a key issue for designers and users of Database
Management Systems (DBMSs). Performance is generally assessed with software
benchmarks that help, e.g., test architectural choices, compare different
technologies or tune a system. In the particular context of data warehousing
and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), although the Transaction Processing
Performance Council (TPC) aims at issuing standard decision-support benchmarks,
few benchmarks do actually exist. We present in this chapter the Data Warehouse
Engineering Benchmark (DWEB), which allows generating various ad-hoc synthetic
data warehouses and workloads. DWEB is fully parameterized to fulfill various
data warehouse design needs. However, two levels of parameterization keep it
relatively easy to tune. We also expand on our previous work on DWEB by
presenting its new Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) feature as well as its
new execution protocol. A Java implementation of DWEB is freely available
on-line, which can be interfaced with most existing relational DMBSs. To the
best of our knowledge, DWEB is the only easily available, up-to-date benchmark
for data warehouses.
