MulTe: A Multi-Tenancy Database Benchmark Framework

Abstract

Multi-tenancy in relational databases has been a topic of interest for a couple of years. On the one hand, ever increasing capabilities and capacities of modern hardware easily allow for multiple database applications to share one system. On the other hand, cloud computing leads to outsourcing of many applications to service architectures, which in turn leads to offerings for relational databases in the cloud, as well.

The ability to benchmark multi-tenancy database systems (MT-DBMSs) is imperative to evaluate and compare systems and helps to reveal otherwise unnoticed shortcomings. With several tenants sharing a MT-DBMS, a benchmark is considerably different compared to classic database benchmarks and calls for new benchmarking methods and performance metrics. Unfortunately, there is no single, well-accepted multi-tenancy benchmark for MT-DBMSs available and few efforts have been made regarding the methodology and general tooling of the process.

We propose a method to benchmark MT-DBMSs and provide a framework for building such benchmarks. To support the cumbersome process of defining and generating tenants, loading and querying their data, and analyzing the results we propose and provide MulTe, an open-source framework that helps with all these steps.