GeoBenchr: An Application-Centric Benchmarking Suite for Spatiotemporal Database Platforms
This work addresses the problem of selecting efficient spatiotemporal database systems for practitioners in domains like cycling and aviation, but it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarks by adding an application-centric focus.
The authors tackled the lack of an application-centric benchmarking suite for spatiotemporal database platforms by proposing GeoBenchr, an open-source tool that enables comprehensive evaluation across diverse datasets and workloads, with results emphasizing its importance for selecting suitable systems in real-world scenarios.
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.