Pocket Data: The Need for TPC-MOBILE

Embedded database engines such as SQLite provide a convenient data persistence layer and have spread along with the applications using them to many types of systems, including interactive devices such as smartphones. Android, the most widely-distributed smartphone platform, both uses SQLite internally and provides interfaces encouraging apps to use SQLite to store their own private structured data. As similar functionality appears in all major mobile operating systems, embedded database performance affects the response times and resource consumption of billions of smartphones and the millions of apps that run on them—making it more important than ever to characterize smartphone embedded database workloads. To do so, we present results from an experiment which recorded SQLite activity on 11 Android smartphones during one month of typical usage. Our analysis shows that Android SQLite usage produces queries and access patterns quite different from canonical server workloads. We argue that evaluating smartphone embedded databases will require a new benchmarking suite and we use our results to outline some of its characteristics.