Adding a Temporal Dimension to the TPC-H Benchmark

Abstract

The importance of time in decision-support is widely recognized and has been addressed through temporal applications or through native temporal features by major DBMS vendors. In this paper we propose a framework for adding a new temporal component to the TPC-H benchmark. Our proposal includes temporal DDL, procedures to populate the temporal tables via insertselect thereby providing history, and temporal queries based on a workload that covers the temporal dimension broken down as current, history, and both. The queries we define as part of this benchmark include the typical SQL operators involved in scans, joins and aggregations. The paper concludes with experimental results. While in this paper we consider adding temporal history to a subset of the TPC-H benchmark tables namely Part/ Supplier/Partsupp, our proposed framework addresses a need and uses, as a starting point, a benchmark that is widely successful and well-understood.