Characterization of TPC-H Queries for a Column-Oriented Database on a Dual-Core AMD Athlon Processor

Column-oriented databases are reported to perform orders of mag-nitude faster than traditional row-oriented databases for Decision Support System (DSS) workloads. However, there have been few investigations on the detailed hardware characterization of DSS benchmarks namely TPC-H for column-oriented databases. In this paper, we characterize the performance of the TPC-H benchmark for a popular column-oriented database called MonetDB running on a dual-core AMD Athlon machine. Specifically, we measure the performance of key microarchitectural components and provide very detailed analysis of the execution time breakdown of Mon-etDB during the execution of TPC-H queries. We analyze in detail the nature of the various stalls namely cache stalls, branch mis-prediction stalls and resource stalls in order to identify the causes of these performance impediments in column-oriented databases. We then indicate possible research directions to minimize these stalls in column-oriented databases. Finally, we compare our re-sults with published results on the characterization of TPC-H for row-oriented databases. As opposed to the previous approaches that used system-level monitoring, we used thread-level monitor-ing of database threads to study the performance of the database alone in isolation from the rest of the system. This enabled us to characterize the performance of databases independent of any other executing processes. 1