Facilities for the storage and analysis of large quantities of spatial data are important to many applications, and are central to geographic information systems. This has given rise to a range of proposals for spatial data models and software architectures that allow database systems to be used cleanly and efficiently with spatial data. However, although many spatial database systems have been built, there have been few systematic comparisons of the functionality or the performance of such systems. This is probably at least partly due to the lack of a widely used, standard spatial database benchmark. This paper presents a benchmark for vector spatial databases that covers a range of typical GIS functions, and shows how the benchmark has been implemented in two systems: the object-relational database PostgreSQL, and the deductive object-oriented database ROCK & ROLL extended to support the ROSE algebra. The benchmark serves both to evaluate the facilities provided by the systems and to allow conclusions to be drawn on the efficiency of their spatial storage managers.