Flight Data Benchmark
CLI name:
flightdata- usebenchbox run --benchmark flightdataQuery templates: every Flight Data query
The Flight Data benchmark uses US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) On-Time Performance data to exercise real-world aviation analytics - delays, routes, carriers, and temporal patterns - across 20 OLAP queries.
Overview
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Total Queries | 20 |
| Categories | 5 (on-time, delay, routes, temporal, carriers) |
| Data Source | BTS TranStats (downloader included) |
| Schema | Flight records with carrier, airport, and delay fields |
| Scale | SF=0.01 (1 month sample) → SF≥10 (full corpus) |
Query Categories
| Category | Queries | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| ontime | 5 | On-time performance rates and trends |
| delay | 4 | Delay causes and attribution |
| routes | 4 | Route performance and connectivity |
| temporal | 4 | Day-of-week, month, and hour-of-day patterns |
| carriers | 3 | Carrier comparison and ranking |
Scale Factors
| Scale | Approx. Flights | Approx. Size | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.01 | ~600 K | ~10 MB | 1-month BTS / dev sample |
| 0.1 | ~2.4 M | ~100 MB | ~4 months of BTS data |
| 1.0 | ~24 M | ~2.8 GB | ~41 months (~3.4 years), uncompressed CSV |
| ≥10.0 | Full | ~10 GB+ | Approaches full historical corpus |
Usage
benchbox run --platform duckdb --benchmark flightdata --scale 1.0
benchbox run --platform duckdb --benchmark flightdata --scale 0.01
benchbox run --platform duckdb --benchmark flightdata --scale 1.0 \ --benchmark-option end_year=2024
benchbox run --platform duckdb --benchmark flightdata --scale 1.0 \ --benchmark-option seed=42The first command uses the default scale (SF=1.0, about 24M flights, about 2.8 GB of uncompressed CSV). The second is a quick development sample. The third pins the most recent year included; the default is LAST_AVAILABLE_YEAR. The fourth makes runs reproducible through a seed.
Benchmark Options
| Option | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
end_year | LAST_AVAILABLE_YEAR | Most recent year to include (works back) |
seed | None | Random seed for reproducibility |
force_regenerate | False | Force data regeneration |
Data Generation
BenchBox downloads BTS On-Time Performance extracts via the bundled downloader.
The initial pull can be large for SF ≥ 1 - use the generate phase in isolation
to pre-stage data:
benchbox datagen --benchmark flightdata --scale 1.0Platform Support
Any SQL platform supported by BenchBox can run Flight Data. It is a useful real-world complement to TPC-H and NYC Taxi for temporal / categorical workloads and is supported on DataFrame platforms (Polars, Pandas, etc.) via the bundled DataFrame query definitions.
See Also
- NYC Taxi - companion real-world benchmark with geospatial focus
- TSBS DevOps - time-series workload alternative
- BTS TranStats - upstream data source