We are doing all of the above. Microbenchmarks that show only the performance of the DB engine still serve a purpose. And the difference between the microbenches and the full benches shows you how much overhead is eaten in the rest of the system. E.g., when testing read performance of SQLite3 adapted to LMDB, we measured only a 1-2% improvement, because the majority of SQLite3 read execution time is spent in SQL processing, not in its Btree code.
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We are doing all of the above. Microbenchmarks that show only the performance of the DB engine still serve a purpose. And the difference between the microbenches and the full benches shows you how much overhead is eaten in the rest of the system. E.g., when testing read performance of SQLite3 adapted to LMDB, we measured only a 1-2% improvement, because the majority of SQLite3 read execution time is spent in SQL processing, not in its Btree code.