aphyr

Hi S-------. I'm not an expert in performance benchmarking--I focus on 
correctness and safety--but I have a few pieces of advice here.

0. Pick multiple workloads that cover the gamut of behaviors in each DB.  
*Don't* choose a completely sharded workload for VoltDB. Don't choose a 
purely commutative workload for Cassandra. Cassandra's Paxos 
implementation is slow and a good benchmark will demonstrate 
that--however, it *doesn't* (I think?) require a global coordinator, 
which means it might *scale* better than a single-coordinator system 
like, say, VoltDB. Talk about those differences!