A Comparative Testing on Performance of Blockchain and Relational Database: Foundation for Applying Smart Technology into Current Business Systems

Blockchain technologies have been developing very fast recently. Ethereum, as the second generation of blockchain, can support smart contracts with various functions. Blockchain, combined with IoT technologies like RFID, can bring more security into IoT systems. It has been noted that just storing hash values, addresses and transaction records cannot meet the needs of various blockchain applications. Thus, how to test capacity of reading/writing data for blockchain and further make comparisons with the traditional relational databases needs to be paid attention. Although there has been some research on testing and analyzing the performance of blockchains, few studies focus on analyzing blockchains and relational databases. This test was conducted to analyze the capacities of reading/writing data and processing/recording transactions of blockchains and relational databases. Ethereum and MySQL are chosen as the representatives of blockchain and relational databases. This test has three aims: (1) getting the detailed data of the blockchain's capacity of processing transactions; (2) identifying the bottleneck or potential bottleneck in blockchain systems; (3) putting forward a testing method and testing indexes which are reasonable, practical and compatible with the current development situations of blockchain systems. With the results data, it was concluded that the maximum data volume in single transaction on blockchain network was about 1/10 of MySQL. As for the time spent in processing single transaction, the blockchain network was 80-2000 times as much as MySQL. Thus, it's recommended to store little-size data into blockchain. For more detailed testing, these indexes and testing method can be referenced.