A database benchmark is a sample database and a group of database applications able to run on several different database systems in order to measure performance of each system and relate it to price of each system (price/ performance ratio)
Performance metric is typically a throughput metric (work/second, e.g number of transactions executed
per second, number of queries executed per hour)
Price metric is typically five years cost of ownership
A domain specific benchmark specifies a synthetic workload characterizing typical applications in the problem domain
For example, numeric computations benchmark (number of floating point operations per second), transaction processing benchmark (number of transactions processed per second), query processing benchmark (number of queries processed per hour)
TPC-DS benchmark models several generally applicable aspects of a decision support system, including queries and data maintenance
The benchmark measures query response time in single user mode, query throughput in multi user mode and data maintenance performance for a given hardware, operating system, and data processing system configuration under a controlled, complex, multi-user decision support workload
TPC-DS Version 2 enables emerging technologies, such as Big Data systems, to execute the benchmark