Benchmarking HOAP for Scalable Document Data Management: A First Step

Enterprises today are becoming ever more reliant on real-time information and analytics for steering and optimizing their businesses. As a result, database system architectures with hybrid data management support - known as HTAP (Hybrid Transactional/ Analytical Processing) or HOAP (Hybrid Operational/Analytical Processing) support - are appearing and increasingly gaining traction in both the commercial and research sectors. Hybrid platforms first appeared in the relational world, and they are often linked in that world to concurrent high-end server technology trends such as columnar storage and mainmemory data management.This paper focuses on hybrid platforms, but in a very different world - in the document data management, or NoSQL, world. In this work, we report on a first effort to characterize the hybrid performance of a scalable document database system that purports to provide what one might call "HOAP for JSON". We have borrowed from and extended the TPC-C benchmark to study the performance of Couchbase Server, a horizontally scalable NoSQL platform that offers HOAP via the combination of its Data/Index/Query and Analytics Services. Our results attest to the importance of architecting a NoSQL platform for HOAP, both in terms of its approach(es) to query processing and its provision of performance isolation for the operational and analytical components of a mixed workload. We share our initial results, the insights that we have gained thus far, and our thoughts on future work related to benchmarking such systems.