GeoBenchr: An Application-Centric Benchmarking Suite for Spatiotemporal Database Platforms

TL;DR

GeoBenchr is an open-source benchmarking suite designed to evaluate spatiotemporal database platforms across realistic, application-centric scenarios, addressing limitations of existing benchmarks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, application-focused benchmarking tool for spatiotemporal databases, enabling realistic performance evaluation across diverse use cases.

Findings

GeoBenchr effectively evaluates system scalability and configuration impacts.

Performance varies significantly across different spatiotemporal platforms.

Application-centric benchmarking provides valuable insights for real-world system selection.

Abstract

The rapid growth of spatiotemporal data volumes needs to be handled by database systems capable of efficiently managing and querying such data. Existing systems such as PostGIS, SpaceTime, and MobilityDB offer partial solutions but differ widely in scope and performance. Also, first spatiotemporal benchmarks provide valuable insights but are limited in scope and, to our knowledge, no application-centric benchmarking suite exists. In this paper, we propose GeoBenchr, an open-source, application-centric benchmarking suite for spatiotemporal platforms. GeoBenchr enables comprehensive evaluation across diverse datasets, query types, and workload patterns, reflecting realistic use cases from domains such as cycling, aviation, and maritime tracking. We use our GeoBenchr prototype to evaluate several system aspects including scalability, configuration impact, and cross-platform performance comparison. Our results highlight the importance of application-centric benchmarking in selecting suitable spatiotemporal database systems for real-world scenarios.