The present disclosure relates to methods and systems for compressing workloads for use with index tuning. The methods and systems receive a workload with a plurality of queries. The methods and systems represent each query using query features and a utility. The methods and systems select a query for a query subset based on a benefit of the query determined using the query features and the utility. The methods and systems update the features and the utility of the remaining queries in the workload and select another query to add to the query subset based on an updated benefit determined using the updated features and utilities. The methods and systems select queries for the query subset equal to a received query subset size. The methods and systems use the query subset in index tuning to provide one or more indexes to recommendations.