SpBench: An Agent-Native Framework for Cross-Engine Lakehouse Benchmarking

arXiv:2611.00449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SpBench is an agent-native framework for cross-engine lakehouse benchmarking, in production use for benchmarking Snowpark, Snowpark Connect for Apache Spark, and other execution environments across standardized suites -- such as TPCx-BB and TPC-DI -- and custom benchmarks distilled from production workload patterns. It runs continuously across a broad portfolio of workloads, guiding the performance roadmap and detecting regressions for production-scale data engines. Benchmarking has historically been an expensive investment requiring continuous cross-functional collaboration and domain expertise, making it difficult to obtain actionable performance insights. SpBench provides (i) a typed, code-generated benchmark substrate that compiles platform-agnostic benchmark definitions into fair, comparable platform-specific implementations; (ii) a structured-telemetry contract recording every run as queryable fact and dimension data, letting LLM agents query results deterministically; and (iii) an agent-native harness of three composable skills to expedite building benchmarks and analyzing results. This agent-native architecture enabled the rapid development of more than 400 benchmark queries that run on a regular cadence to detect performance regressions; catching these has directly led to improvements in production.