An XML transaction processing benchmark

XML database functionality has been emerging in “XML-only” databases as well as in the major relational database products. Yet, there is no industry standard XML database benchmark to evalu-ate alternative implementations. The research community has proposed several benchmarks which are all useful in their respec-tive scope, such as evaluating XQuery processors. However, they do not aim to evaluate a database system in its entirety and do not represent all relevant characteristics of a real-world XML applica-tion. Often they only define read-only single-user tests on a single XML document. We have developed an application-oriented and domain-specific benchmark called Transaction Processing over XML (TPoX). It exercises all aspects of XML databases, includ-ing storage, indexing, logging, transaction processing, and concur-rency control. Based on our analysis of real XML applications, TPoX simulates a financial multi-user workload with XML data conforming to the FIXML standard. In this paper we describe TPoX and present early performance results. We also make its implementation publicly available.