Who Watches the Watchmen? On the Lack of Validation in NoSQL Benchmarking

There are numerous approaches towards quantifying the performance of NoSQL datastores with respect to dimensions that are notoriously hard to capture such as staleness or consistency in general. Many of these approaches, though, are built on assumptions regarding the underlying infrastructure or the test scenario and may lead to invalid results, if those assumptions do not hold. As a consequence, in-depth knowledge of both the system under test and the benchmarking procedure is required to prevent misleading results. In this paper, we want to make the case for more experimental validation in NoSQL benchmarking to uncover the bounds of existing benchmarking approaches.