In this paper, we present a new DBMS performance benchmark that can simulate user exploration with any specified dashboard design made of standard visualization and interaction components. The distinguishing feature of our SImulation-BAsed (or SIMBA) benchmark is its ability to model user analysis goals as a set of SQL queries to be generated through a valid sequence of user interactions, as well as measure the completion of analysis goals by testing for equivalence between the user's previous queries and their goal queries. In this way, the SIMBA benchmark can simulate how an analyst opportunistically searches for interesting insights at the beginning of an exploration session and eventually hones in on specific goals towards the end. To demonstrate the versatility of the SIMBA benchmark, we use it to test the performance of four DBMSs with six different dashboard specifications and compare our results with IDEBench. Our results show how goal-driven simulation can reveal gaps in DBMS performance missed by existing benchmarking methods and across a range of data exploration scenarios.

Dashboards remain ubiquitous tools for analyzing data and disseminating the findings. Understanding the range of dashboard designs, from simple to complex, can support development of authoring tools that enable end-users to meet their analysis and communication goals. Yet, there has been little work that provides a quantifiable, systematic, and descriptive overview of dashboard design patterns. Instead, existing approaches only consider a handful of designs, which limits the breadth of patterns that can be surfaced. More quantifiable approaches, inspired by machine learning (ML), are presently limited to single visualizations or capture narrow features of dashboard designs. To address this gap, we present an approach for modeling the content and composition of dashboards using a graph representation. The graph decomposes dashboard designs into nodes featuring content "blocks'; and uses edges to model "relationships", such as layout proximity and interaction, between nodes. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, and its extension over prior work, we apply this representation to derive a census of 25,620 dashboards from Tableau Public, providing a descriptive overview of the core building blocks of dashboards in the wild and summarizing prevalent dashboard design patterns. We discuss concrete applications of both a graph representation for dashboard designs and the resulting census to guide the development of dashboard authoring tools, making dashboards accessible, and for leveraging AI/ML techniques. Our findings underscore the importance of meeting users where they are by broadly cataloging dashboard designs, both common and exotic.