  We present in this paper a new benchmark for evaluating the performances of
data warehouses. Benchmarking is useful either to system users for comparing
the performances of different systems, or to system engineers for testing the
effect of various design choices. While the TPC (Transaction Processing
Performance Council) standard benchmarks address the first point, they are not
tuneable enough to address the second one. Our Data Warehouse Engineering
Benchmark (DWEB) allows to generate various ad-hoc synthetic data warehouses
and workloads. DWEB is fully parameterized. However, two levels of
parameterization keep it easy to tune. Since DWEB mainly meets engineering
benchmarking needs, it is complimentary to the TPC standard benchmarks, and not
a competitor. Finally, DWEB is implemented as a Java free software that can be
interfaced with most existing relational database management systems.
