This May, several members of the Penn DB group attended the Northeast Database Day hosted at BU! The group presented two posters on query optimization.
Ph.D. student Jeff Tao (supervisors: Ryan Marcus and Andrew Head) presented his work on using Bayesian optimization and deep learning to search for optimal query plans. This search process can be considered “superoptimization,” since the search process itself executes query plans. Jeff’s work has the potential to find gains in highly repetitive and costly analytic queries.
Ph.D. student Zixuan Yi (supervisors: Zachary Ives and Ryan Marcus) presented her work on workload-level query steering. Zixuan showed that the space of optimizer configurations for each query in a workload can be effectively explored using matrix completion. Zixuan’s work is also described in her recent workshop paper (PDF).
Both Jeff and Zixuan received valuable feedback at the event, and plan to turn their work into full papers soon. Undergraduate Austin Wang, visiting Ph.D. student Yao Tian, and Ryan Marcus also came along!
You can check out Zixuan and Jeff’s posters below:
