Publication
Redbench: Workload Synthesis From Cloud Traces
Johannes Wehrstein; Roman Heinrich; Mihail Stoian; Skander Krid; Martin Stemmer; Andreas Kipf; Carsten Binnig; Muhammad El-Hindi
In: Proc. VLDB Endow. (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), Vol. 19, No. 9, Pages 2113-2125, arXiv, 2026.
Abstract
Workload traces from cloud data warehouse providers reveal that
standard benchmarks such as TPC-H and TPC-DS fail to capture
key characteristics of real-world workloads, including query repeti-
tion and string-heavy queries. In this paper, we introduce Redbench,
a novel benchmark featuring a workload generator that reproduces
real-world workload characteristics derived from traces released by
cloud providers. Redbench integrates multiple workload generation
techniques to tailor workloads to specific objectives, transforming
existing benchmarks into realistic query streams that preserve in-
trinsic workload characteristics. By focusing on inherent workload
signals rather than execution-specific metrics, Redbench bridges the
gap between synthetic and real workloads. Our evaluation shows
that (1) Redbench produces more realistic and reproducible work-
loads for cloud data warehouse benchmarking, and (2) Redbench
reveals the impact of system optimizations across four commercial
data warehouse platforms. We believe that Redbench provides a cru-
cial foundation for advancing research on optimization techniques
for modern cloud data warehouses.