Dedicated object management system benchmarks for software engineering applications

Non-standard database systems have now become available, even as commercial products. They overcome a lot of the deficiencies of relational systems w.r.t. their use in engineering applications like computer-aided design or software engineering. Their rather sophisticated functionality especially concerning the manipulation of complex objects makes them highly attractive for engineering applications. If used as the central database of a rather complex application they could however still become a bottleneck w.r.t. performance. This paper presents a new way to define a special purpose benchmark which enables one to select the fastest database system for a particular software engineering application. It is argued that existing benchmarks are not appropriate to support such a selection, because they neglect important application specific characteristics which significantly influence the database performance