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

2026-03-10

AI Summary

Existing spatiotemporal database benchmarks lack coverage of real-world application scenarios, limiting their ability to effectively evaluate system performance under practical conditions. To address this gap, this work proposes the first open-source, application-oriented benchmarking framework for spatiotemporal databases, integrating real-world datasets from diverse domains—such as bike-sharing, aviation, and maritime operations—along with a rich set of query templates and configurable workloads. The framework enables comprehensive cross-platform evaluation of mainstream systems including PostGIS, SpaceTime, and MobilityDB, substantially enhancing both the relevance and breadth of performance assessment. Experimental results demonstrate the critical role of application-driven benchmarks in informed system selection and reveal significant differences among platforms in terms of scalability, sensitivity to configuration, and overall performance characteristics.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Spatial, Temporal or Spatio-Temporal Data
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Querying, indexing, and retrieval in Web-related graphs

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.

Problem

• spatiotemporal database
• benchmarking
• application-centric
• performance evaluation
• GeoBenchr

Innovation

• spatiotemporal benchmarking
• application-centric evaluation
• GeoBenchr
• database performance comparison
• real-world use cases