Lies, Damn Lies and Database Benchmarks

(questdb.com)

30 points | by eigenBasis 2 days ago

6 comments

  • kjellsbells 1 hour ago
    The database wars of the late 1990s were full of this kind of stuff. Oracle, Sybase, IBM etc invested heavily in tuning specifically for benchmarks like TPC-C just so they could post ads in the Wall St Journal saying theirs was faster.

    I do sympathize with OP, though, their objection to measuring cold-start queries is incomplete without also describing how often cold start needs to happen. If you restart once every five years then it doesnt matter as much if it takes 20 minutes to be warm. Every hour, that would be a real problem.

  • jaapz 32 minutes ago
    Anyone here using QuestDB in production? What is your use case? What is your experience?

    We want to migrate away from InfluxDB eventually (because of their 180 on OSS, and their tendency to reinvent the product every major release), and QuestDB seems like an interesting option.

  • bitlad 3 hours ago
    Reminds me of the recent Terminal Bench controversy [1][2][3]

    If theres a benchmark, people will cheat, lie and optimize for that benchmark. Honest depends on the compliance enforced on teams. But if, compliance itself is weak, it is going to be taken advantage of. Like growing up india, you would optimize for the exam and not what you learn from it.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920787

    [2] https://www.tbench.ai/news/leaderboard-integrity-update

    [3] https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/

    • puzpuzpuz-hn 4 minutes ago
      Exactly! The task gets even trickier when you're benchmarking lots of systems of different kinds: cloud databases, self-hosted ones, embedded engines, CLI tools.
  • N_Lens 2 hours ago
    Same with LLM benchmarks these days.
    • Metaluim 1 hour ago
      Well, the pelican benchmark is easily verifiable.
  • dkdcdev 45 minutes ago
    see also “ Fair Benchmarking Considered Difficult: Common Pitfalls In Database Performance Testing” by the DuckDB folks with a classic Figure 1
    • puzpuzpuz-hn 4 minutes ago
      Thanks for the reference. Will check!
  • ozgrakkurt 1 hour ago
    Really respectable writing and perspective. Questdb blog posts that get posted here never disappoint
    • puzpuzpuz-hn 2 minutes ago
      Thanks! We do our best to be as transparent as possible when it comes to benchmarking.