How else did they benchmark it? Dr. Bert Scalzo says in an
Tuning an Oracle8i Database running Linux, "The trouble with these tests-for example, Bonnie, Bonnie++, Dbench, Iobench, Iozone, Mongo, and Postmark-is that they are basic file system throughput tests, so their results generally do not pertain in any meaningful fashion to the way relational database systems access data files." Instead users benchmarking file systems for database applications should use these two well-known and widely accepted database benchmarks:
- AS3AP: a scalable, portable ANSI SQL relational database benchmark that provides a comprehensive set of tests of database-processing power; has built-in scalability and portability for testing a broad range of systems; minimizes human effort in implementing and running benchmark tests; and provides a uniform, metric, straightforward interpretation of the results.
- TPC-C: an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark that involves a mix of five concurrent transactions of various types and either executes completely online or queries for deferred execution. The database comprises nine types of tables, having a wide range of record and population sizes. This benchmark measures the number of transactions per second.
Moreover, some filessystems, such as XFS, scale well and handle large files better even though they are a little slower on smaller systems and with smaller files in comparison to other filesystems, such as ReiserFS. See
Scalability in the XFS File System, by Adam Sweeney, Doug Doucette, Wei Hu, Curtis Anderson, Mike Nishimoto, and Geoff Peck.
