Wikipedia
The Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) is an open-source specification and program suite for evaluating retrieval and maintenance capabilities of computer programs. It is often used to compare relative performance of NoSQL database management systems.
The original benchmark was developed by workers in the research division of Yahoo! who released it in 2010 with the stated goal of "facilitating performance comparisons of the new generation of cloud data serving systems", particularly for transaction-processing workloads which differed from ones measured by benchmarks designed for more traditional database management systems.
YCSB has been contrasted with a benchmark from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC-H), with YCSB being called a "Big Data" benchmark while TPC-H is a "Decision Support" benchmark.
YCSB has been used by DBMS vendors for "benchmark marketing". It has been used in scholarly or tutorial discussions, particularly for Apache HBase. It has been used for multiple-product comparisons by industry observers such as Network World (comparing Cassandra, MongoDB, and Riak), Thumbtack Technologies (comparing Aerospike, Cassandra, Couchbase, and MongoDB), and the Polytechnic Institute and University of Coimbra (comparing Cassandra, HBase, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Oracle NoSQL, OrientDB, Redis, Scalaris, Tarantool, and Voldemort. Oracle NoSQL Database Exceeds 1.9 Million Mixed YCSB Ops/Second