Pocket Data: The Need for TPC-MOBILE

Because embedded database engines, such as SQLite, provide a convenient data persistence layer, they 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 a result, embedded database performance affects the response times and resource consumption of both the platforms that operation 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 produce queries and access patterns quite different from canonical server workloads. We argue that evaluating smartphone embedded database will require a new benchmarking suite, and we use our results to outline some of its characteristics.