  Data warehouse architectural choices and optimization techniques are critical
to decision support query performance. To facilitate these choices, the
performance of the designed data warehouse must be assessed, usually with
benchmarks. These tools can either help system users comparing the performances
of different systems, or help system engineers testing the effect of various
design choices. While the Transaction Processing Performance Council's standard
benchmarks address the first point, they are not tunable enough to address the
second one and fail to model different data warehouse schemas. By contrast, our
Data Warehouse Engineering Benchmark (DWEB) allows generating various ad-hoc
synthetic data warehouses and workloads. DWEB is implemented as a Java free
software that can be interfaced with most existing relational database
management systems. The full specifications of DWEB, as well as experiments we
performed to illustrate how our benchmark may be used, are provided in this
paper.
