Hi, I've just been looking into the TPC-H benchmark with intention to put together some scripts which can be run easily to output some run times for each of the 22 queries.
I've not had a great deal of exposure to pgbench yet, but I had thought that it might be able to help me run these queries with the randomly chosen inputs that are described in the TPC-H spec. >From the spec under 2.4.6.3: 1. DATE is the first of January of a randomly selected year within [1993 .. 1997]; 2. DISCOUNT is randomly selected within [0.02 .. 0.09]; 3. QUANTITY is randomly selected within [24 .. 25]. With pgbench I can do: \setrandom qty 24 25 then throw a :qty into the query and have pgbench replace that with either 24 or 25. The problem is that this does not work for anything apart from integer types. I also can't seem to do anything with the date type. Perhaps it would be nice to be able to do something like: \setrandom date '1993-01-01' '1994-01-01' '1995-01-01' '1996-01-01' '1997-01-01' But this would be ambiguous if I wanted to choose either from either 10 or 20 as: \setrandom var 10 20 would choose a random number between 10 and 20, not 10 or 20. I would imagine that code could be added to allow the random to choose a floating point number, if one or more of the inputs had a decimal point in them, but I can't see around how to make it work with lists without changing the syntax. Perhaps [between] could become a optional keyword in there so that we could do: \setrandom var between 0 10 And for lists it could work like: \setrandom var list 'a' 'b' 'c' There should be no conflicts with the original syntax, as as far as I'm aware only an integer number can follow the variable name. I was planning on putting something together to help me with this, but I thought I'd post here first so that I might actually end up with something useful at the end of it. So my questions are: 1. Would anyone else find this useful? 2. Is my proposed syntax ok? Can you think of anything better or more flexible? Regards David Rowley
