DriftBench: Defining and Generating Data and Query Workload Drift for Benchmarking

Abstract: Data and workload drift are key to evaluating database components such as caching, cardinality estimation, indexing, and query optimization. Yet, existing benchmarks are static, offering little to no support for modeling drift. This limitation stems from the lack of clear definitions and tools for generating data and workload drift. Motivated by this gap, we propose a unified taxonomy for data and workload drift, grounded in observations from both academia and industry. Building on this foundation, we introduce DriftBench, a lightweight and extensible framework for generating data and workload drift in benchmark inputs. Together, the taxonomy and DriftBench provide a standardized vocabulary and mechanism for modeling and generating drift in benchmarking. We demonstrate their effectiveness through case studies involving data drift, workload drift, and drift-aware cardinality estimation.