SS-DB: A Standard Science DBMS Benchmark

In this paper, we propose a new benchmark for scientific data management systems called SS-DB. This benchmark, loosely modeled on an astronomy workload, is intended to simulate applications that manipulate array-oriented data through relatively sophisticated user-defined functions. SS-DB is representative of the processing performed in a number of scientific domains in addition to astronomy, including earth science, oceanography, and medical image analysis. The benchmark includes three types of operations: (i) manipulation of raw imagery, including processing pixels to extract geo-spatial observations; (ii) manipulation of observations, including spatial aggregation and grouping into related sets; and (iii) manipulation of groups, including a number of relatively complex geometric