Experiments or simulation? A characterization of evaluation methods for in-memory databases

The recent growth of interest for in-memory databases poses the question on whether established prediction methods such as response surfaces and simulation are effective to describe the performance of these systems. In particular, the limited dependence of in-memory technologies on the disk makes methods such as simulation more appealing than in the past, since disks are difficult to simulate. To answer this question, we study an in-memory commercial solution, SAP HANA, deployed on a high-end server with 120 physical cores. First, we apply experimental design methods to generate response surfaces that describe database performance as a function of workload and hardware parameters. Next, we develop a class-switching queueing network model to predict in-memory database performance under similar scenarios. By comparing the applicability of the two approaches to modeling multi-tenancy, we find that both queueing and response surface models yield mean prediction errors in the range 5%-22% with respect to mean memory occupancy and response times, but the accuracy for the latter deteriorates in response surfaces as the number of experiments are reduced, whereas simulation is effective in all cases. This suggests that simulation can be very effective in performance prediction for in-memory database management.