This paper explores the effect that changing access patterns has on the performance of database management systems. Changes in access patterns play an important role in determining the efficiency of key performance optimization techniques, such as dynamic clustering, prefetching, and buffer replacement. However, all existing benchmarks or evaluation frameworks produce static access patterns in which objects are always accessed in the same order repeatedly. Hence, we have proposed the Dynamic Evaluation Framework (DEF) that simulates access pattern changes using configurable styles of change. DEF has been designed to be open and fully extensible (e.g., new access pattern change models can be added easily). In this paper, we instantiate DEF into the Dynamic object Evaluation Framework (DoEF) which is designed for object databases, i.e., object-oriented or object-relational databases such as multi-media databases or most XML databases.The capabilities of DoEF have been evaluated by simulating the execution of four different dynamic clustering algorithms. The results confirm our analysis that flexible conservative re-clustering is the key in determining a clustering algorithm's ability to adapt to changes in access pattern. These results show the effectiveness of DoEF at determining the adaptability of each dynamic clustering algorithm to changes in access pattern in a simulation environment. In a second set of experiments, we have used DoEF to compare the performance of two real-life object stores : Platypus and SHORE. DoEF has helped to reveal the poor swapping performance of Platypus.