Portable faultloads based on operator faults for DBMS dependability benchmarking

Databases play a central role in the information infrastructure of most organizations. The characterization of DBMS (database management systems) dependability is then of utmost importance. Existing performance benchmarks for transactional and database areas include two major components: a workload and a set of performance measures. The definition of a benchmark to characterize dependability needs a new component - the faultload. Operator faults represent a major cause of failures in large DBMS. This paper proposes three approaches for the definition of portable faultloads based on operator faults to benchmark the dependability of DBMS and shows a benchmarking example of a commercial (Oracle) and an open source (PostgreSQL) database.