English

DataClawEval: A Benchmark for Data Engineering Agents in Real Industrial Harness

Artificial Intelligence 2026-07-30 v1

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents are increasingly being deployed to automate complex workflows, promising to revolutionize data management and processing. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on simplified Text-to-SQL translation or data analysis, leaving the critical and complex domain of end-to-end data engineering largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce DataClawEval, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically to evaluate the end-to-end task completion capabilities of autonomous agents in real-world data engineering scenarios. Built upon production-grade code authored by professional enterprise data engineers, it comprises 100 rigorous, end-to-end tasks spanning five execution engines: PySpark, MySQL, HiveSQL, PrestoSQL/Trino, and FlinkSQL. Rather than non-deterministic LLM-as-a-judge scoring, each task is executed within a case-specific, isolated sandbox and graded by deterministic, rule-based scripts. Evaluating 16 frontier agents exposes critical limitations: The strongest model attains only 74.9 overall, and no single model dominates, as each excels on a different engine, revealing strict domain specialization rather than omnipotent proficiency. Thus, autonomous data engineering remains a formidable, unresolved challenge. We release our dataset, containerized environments, and deterministic evaluation scripts at https://github.com/Dicemy/DataClawEval/tree/master

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.28033,
  title  = {DataClawEval: A Benchmark for Data Engineering Agents in Real Industrial Harness},
  author = {Debin Meng and Jiaming Yang and Zefang Zong and Tengyue Xu and Haining Xie and Yang Li and Peng Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.28033},
  year   = {2026}
}