Welcome to the BenchBox Blog¶
Your source for benchmarking insights, methodology deep dives, and honest performance analysis.
Reading time: 3 min | TL;DR: We’re launching a blog to share what we’ve learned building BenchBox, an open-source framework for running TPC-H, TPC-DS, and other benchmarks across SQL and DataFrame platforms.
Why we’re writing¶
Running database benchmarks shouldn’t require reinventing the wheel every time. We are building BenchBox to solve problems we’ve seen: inconsistent methodology, tedious setup, and results that can’t be reproduced.
This blog is where we’ll share what we’ve learned, both about building benchmark tooling and about the benchmarks themselves.
What you’ll find here¶
Methodology deep dives: Why does TPC-H Q17 show 10x variance across platforms? How should you handle cold vs warm cache? We’ll explore these questions with data.
Architecture walkthroughs: How BenchBox translates SQL across 10+ dialects, validates results against reference answers, and handles DataFrame execution paths.
Practical tutorials: From your first benchmark run to adding custom platforms, step-by-step guides with working code.
BenchBox in action: Real benchmark runs demonstrating features, not platform horse races, but honest exploration of what the numbers mean.
Get started¶
Clone the repo and run your first benchmark:
git clone https://github.com/joeharris76/benchbox
cd benchbox && uv sync
uv run benchbox run --platform duckdb --benchmark tpch --scale 0.01
Check out the quick start guide for detailed setup instructions.
Join the conversation¶
BenchBox is open source and we’d love your input:
GitHub: github.com/joeharris76/benchbox
Issues: Bug reports, feature requests, questions
Discussions: Share your benchmarking experiences
First posts coming soon: a deep dive into TPC-H validation methodology and a walkthrough of BenchBox’s multi-platform architecture.
Have a benchmarking topic you’d like us to cover? Open an issue and let us know.