SQALPEL: A database performance platform

Despite their popularity, database benchmarks only highlight a small fraction of the capabilities of any given DBMS. They often do not highlight problematic components encountered in real life database applications or provide hints for further research and engineering. To alleviate this problem we coined discriminative performance benchmarking as the way to go. It aids in exploring a larger query search space to find performance outliers and their underlying cause. The approach is based on deriving a domain specific language from a sample complex query to identify and execute a query workload. The demo illustrates sqalpel, a complete platform to collect, manage and selectively disseminate performance facts, that enables repeatability studies, and economy of scale by sharing performance experiences.