  With the emergence of XML as a standard for representing business data, new
decision support applications are being developed. These XML data warehouses
aim at supporting On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) operations that
manipulate irregular XML data. To ensure feasibility of these new tools,
important performance issues must be addressed. Performance is customarily
assessed with the help of benchmarks. However, decision support benchmarks do
not currently support XML features. In this paper, we introduce the XML
Warehouse Benchmark (XWeB), which aims at filling this gap. XWeB derives from
the relational decision support benchmark TPC-H. It is mainly composed of a
test data warehouse that is based on a unified reference model for XML
warehouses and that features XML-specific structures, and its associate XQuery
decision support workload. XWeB's usage is illustrated by experiments on
several XML database management systems.
