Which database is the fastest? Anyone can produce a benchmark result — the hard part is producing one that others can trust, repeat, and compare. Without a common reference, numbers from different tests tell you very little.
HammerDB is an open source benchmarking suite hosted by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) through its TPC-OSS initiative. It runs transactional and analytical workloads against MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and IBM Db2, on both Windows and Linux. In this session, Steve Shaw, its creator, explains how to use it to measure database performance in a way that holds up. He covers HammerDB v6.0, including:
- automated CI testing and comparative performance profiles
- session-history-style views for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL that show what the database was waiting on during a run
- reports you can share with TPC-OSS, for transparency and reproducibility
Steve also looks at how this kind of rigorous, open benchmarking helps database engineers find and fix real bottlenecks — as it has for MariaDB.