1. A method of characterizing a query workload for sizing a new database system hardware configuration, comprising: selecting parameters to describe an exemplary query workload comprised of a collection of queries; collecting a plurality of data from execution of the exemplary query workload on multiple system configurations; normalizing the collected data; partitioning the collection of queries in the exemplary query workload into a plurality of clusters representing classes of the queries, based on the normalized data, so that queries within a cluster are similar to each other, but are dissimilar to queries in other clusters; and interpreting the clusters so that the exemplary query workload is described in terms that facilitate characterizing the query workload for sizing a new database system hardware configuration.