GeoYCSB: A Benchmark Framework for the Performance and Scalability Evaluation of Geospatial NoSQL Databases

Abstract

The proliferation of geospatial applications has tremendously increased the variety, velocity, and volume of spatial data that data stores have to manage. Traditional relational databases reveal limitations in handling such big geospatial data, mainly due to their rigid schema requirements and limited scalability. Numerous NoSQL databases have emerged and actively serve as alternative data stores for big spatial data.

This study presents a framework, called GeoYCSB, developed for benchmarking NoSQL databases with geospatial workloads. To develop GeoYCSB, we extend YCSB, a de facto benchmark framework for NoSQL systems, by integrating into its design architecture the new components necessary to support geospatial workloads. GeoYCSB supports both microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks and facilitates the use of real datasets in both. It is extensible to evaluate any NoSQL database, provided they support spatial queries, using geospatial workloads performed on datasets of any geometric complexity. We use GeoYCSB to benchmark two leading document stores, MongoDB and Couchbase, and present the experimental results and analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the extensibility of GeoYCSB by including a new dataset consisting of complex geometries and using it to benchmark a system with a wide variety of geospatial queries: Apache Accumulo, a wide-column store, with the GeoMesa framework applied on top.