Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmarks

The TPC-B benchmark is just one of many created by the Transaction Processing Performance Council. It's the second benchmark from them for what's called an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workload, which is one heavy on database writes. A more current benchmark in that same style is their TPC-C: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/ which includes what can be a fairly complicated mix of transaction types that all revolve around order entry and related inventory in a warehouse.

Using genuine TPC benchmarks isn't something practical to do on your own unless you're a major vendor prepared to license them and follow stringent reporting guidelines. However, there are free and open-source clones of some of their benchmarks available, which follow the spirit of the benchmark without giving results that you can necessarily compare as directly across different types of systems. The Database Test (dbt) project has produced clones...