According to various trade journals and corporate marketing machines, we are now on the verge of a revolution---the object-relational database revolution. Since we believe that no one should face a revolution without appropriate armament, this paper presents BUCKY, a new benchmark for object-relational database systems. BUCKY is a query-oriented benchmark that tests many of the key features offered by object-relational systems, including row types and inheritance, references and path expressions, sets of atomic values and of references, methods and late binding, and user-defined abstract data types and their methods. To illustrate the usefulness of BUCKY, we present results from running object-relational BUCKY and a relational equivalent thereof on a state-of-the-art object-relational DBMS. Our results highlight a number of interesting issues. Some are related to limitations of the current state of the art, while others demonstrate the importance of certain features coming soon in SQL3; still others expose shortcomings of today's object-relational model that will need to be corrected before the full promise of these systems can be enjoyed.
Download Material
Principal Investigators
Students