Benchmarking Online Index-Tuning Algorithms

The topic of index tuning has received considerable attention in the research literature. However, very few studies provide a comparative evaluation of the proposed index tuning techniques in the same environment and with the same experimental methodology. In this paper, we outline our efforts in this direction with the development of a performance benchmark for the specific problem of online index tuning. We describe the salient features of the benchmark, present some representative results on the evaluation of different index tuning techniques, and conclude with lessons we learned about implementing and running a benchmark for self tuning systems.