Database Systems Performance Evaluation Techniques

The last few decades has seen a huge transformation in the way businesses are conducted. There has been a paradigm shift from product portfolio based marketing strategies to customer focused marketing strategies. The growth and diversity of the market has greatly profited consumers through higher availability, better quality and lower prices. The same factors however has made it more difficult for businesses to maintain their competitive edge over one another and hence has forced them to think beyond their product portfolio and look at other means to gain higher visibility and customer satisfaction, maintaining all the while their core advantages on pricing and product through improved and more efficient methods of manufacturing and distribution. The advent and spread of computers and networking has been one of the single largest factors that has spurred and aided this enormous movement. More specifically, database management systems now form the core of almost all enterprise logic and business intelligence solutions. This survey tries to emphasize the importance of database systems in enterprise setups and looks at the methods and metrics that are used to evaluate the performance of these database systems.