8.12.2 The MySQL Benchmark Suite

This benchmark suite is meant to tell any user what operations a given SQL implementation performs well or poorly. You can get a good idea for how the benchmarks work by looking at the code and results in the sql-bench directory in any MySQL source distribution.

Note that this benchmark is single-threaded, so it measures the minimum time for the operations performed. We plan to add multi-threaded tests to the benchmark suite in the future.

To use the benchmark suite, the following requirements must be satisfied:

After you obtain a MySQL source distribution, you can find the benchmark suite located in its sql-bench directory. To run the benchmark tests, build MySQL, and then change location into the sql-bench directory and execute the run-all-tests script:

shell> cd sql-bench
shell> perl run-all-tests --server=server_name

server_name should be the name of one of the supported servers. To get a list of all options and supported servers, invoke this command:

shell> perl run-all-tests --help

The crash-me script also is located in the sql-bench directory. crash-me tries to determine what features a database system supports and what its capabilities and limitations are by actually running queries. For example, it determines:

For more information about benchmark results, visit http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/benchmarks/.