Vector Space Inc.

The OLAP Council Benchmark

Every now and then we see a request for the OLAP Council benchmark, last updated in 1998; since nobody else seems to have all the materials in one place, we have decided to put them here as a service.

• The specification can be downloaded here.
• The data generation program is here.

While it may be somewhat dated now, this is still the only such benchmark there has been. Our friends Erik Thomson and George Spofford of DSS Labs produced it for the OLAP Council, which was an industry association of many of the leading OLAP companies. Thomsen and Spofford, who worked with us for a while, have maintained a unique focus on theory in an industry not noted for its enthusiastic support for theory.

The diversity of OLAP products ensured that results of benchmark runs could be — and were — conditioned and spun in various ways by the sponsoring companies. Nonetheless, the benchmark continues to represent a set of basic tasks which OLAP products can be expected to perform, and which can be measured and timed.

The OLAP Council is no longer, and with it, the function of certifying benchmark auditors, so this is hardly a current project. We are making available on our site the benchmark specification, and also a little program that generates data files to run the specification.

Add comment August 1st, 2006

Old news, new news

This article says that almost nobody reads an Internet news post more than 36 hours old.Well, that article is almost a month old, but it’s still very timely.

This by way of saying that now that this site has begun to take on a life, it seems that we’reproducing new content about once a week. We’re no fireballs, but hopefully the infrequency is balanced by the quality and subject matter — how are we doing? Send us email at Vector Space.

August 1st, 2006