The author created a custom workload generator called `dbbench` to drive an investigation into a Linux performance issue affecting a specific customer workload running on SingleStore, a NoSQL database. The issue was caused by the third-party benchmarking tool inadvertently throttling itself when running against SingleStore, leading to incorrect results. The author used `dbbench` to simulate a complicated analytics workload and observed interesting performance behaviors, such as how read query performance changes dramatically after table cleanup. By monitoring and questioning the data throughout the execution of the benchmark, the author was able to identify and fix a complicated performance anomaly. `dbbench` is now publicly available under an Apache license and is being actively used by SingleStore for customer Proof of Concepts and performance testing.