Generating Thousand Benchmark Queries in Seconds Meikel Poess and John M. Stephens Jr.   View Paper (PDF)   Return to INDUSTRIAL SESSION 2: NEW DBMS ARCHITECTURES AND PERFORMANCE Abstract ), the quantification of query performance has often relied on models and methodologies that were developed for systems that were more simplistic, less dynamic, and less central to a successful business. In this paper we present QGEN, a flexible, high-level query generator optimized for decision support system evaluation. QGEN is able to generate arbitrary query sets, which conform to a selected statistical profile without requiring that the queries be statically defined or disclosed prior to testing. Its novel design links query syntax with abstracted data distributions, enabling users to parameterize their query workload to match an emerging access pattern or data set modification. This results in query sets that retain comparability for system comparisons while reflecting the inherent dynamism of operational systems, and which provide a broad range of syntactic and semantic coverage, while remaining focused on appropriate commonalities within a particular evaluation process or business segment. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery