Benchmark frameworks and tools for modelling the workload profile

Ten years after the initial development of MUSBUS and one year after the adoption of the “son-of-MUSBUS”, KENBUS, by SPEC, it seems appropriate to reflect on the philosophy and methodology of this benchmarking approach. aper presents an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the MUSBUS approach, suggests ways in which the methodology may be applied to produce more accurate predictions of system performance, and introduces three new tool sets that may be used to increase the accuracy of performance predictions based upon synthetic benchmarks. These tool sets support realistic emulation of end-user behaviour at a terminal-like interface, provide parametric-driven emulation of both application programs and an underlying DBMS, and assist in the population of synthetic databases with records whose attribute values are both realistic and satisfy the semantic integrity constraints of the database schema. accepts the assertion that the construction of synthetic benchmarks with acceptable performance accuracy is a technically feasible goal, then the benefits of good benchmark development extend into the deployment and production phases of a systemʹs life-cycle, and as a consequence it is argued that the cost of good benchmark development can be more than re-couped over a systemʹs life-time.