Database research and the development of learned query optimisers rely heavily on realistic SQL workloads. Acquiring real-world queries is increasingly difficult, however, due to strict privacy regulations, and publicly released anonymised traces typically strip out executable query text to preserve confidentiality. Existing synthesis tools fail to bridge this training data gap: traditional benchmarks offer too few fixed templates for statistical generalisation, while Large Language Model (LLM) approaches suffer from schema hallucination fabricating non-existent columns and topological collapse systematically defaulting to simplistic join patterns that fail to stress-test query optimisers. We propose SynQL, a deterministic workload synthesis framework that generates structurally diverse, execution-ready SQL workloads. As a foundational step toward bridging the training-data gap, SynQL targets the core SQL fragment -- multi-table joins with projections, aggregations, and range predicates -- which dominates analytical workloads. SynQL abandons probabilistic text generation in favour of traversing the live database's foreign-key graph to populate an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), guaranteeing schema and syntactic validity by construction. A configuration vector $Θ$ provides explicit, parametric control over join topology (Star, Chain, Fork), analytical intensity, and predicate selectivity. Experiments on TPC-H and IMDb show that SynQL produces near-maximally diverse workloads (Topological Entropy $H = 1.53$ bits) and that tree-based cost models trained on the synthetic corpus achieve $R^2 \ge 0.79$ on held-out synthetic test sets with sub-millisecond inference latency, establishing SynQL as an effective foundation for generating training data when production logs are inaccessible.
This paper presents a proposal aiming at better understanding a workload of SQL queries and detecting coherent explorations hidden within the workload. In particular, our work investigates SQLShare [11], a database-as-a-service platform targeting scientists and data scientists with minimal database experience, whose workload was made available to the research community. According to the authors of [11], this workload is the only one containing primarily ad-hoc hand-written queries over user-uploaded datasets. We analyzed this workload by extracting features that characterize SQL queries and we…
Formulating efficient SQL queries requires several cycles of tuning and execution, particularly for inexperienced users. We examine methods that can accelerate and improve this interaction by providing insights about SQL queries prior to execution. We achieve this by predicting properties such as the query answer size, its run-time, and error class. Unlike existing approaches, our approach does not rely on any statistics from the database instance or query execution plans. This is particularly important in settings with limited access to the database instance. Our approach is based on using da…
Selecting the optimal cloud target to migrate SQL estates from on-premises to the cloud remains a challenge. Current solutions are not only time-consuming and error-prone, requiring significant user input, but also fail to provide appropriate recommendations. We present Doppler, a scalable recommendation engine that provides right-sized Azure SQL Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) recommendations without requiring access to sensitive customer data and queries. Doppler introduces a novel price-performance methodology that allows customers to get a personalized rank of relevant cloud targets solely ba…
We present a system to support generalized SQL workload analysis and management for multi-tenant and multi-database platforms. Workload analysis applications are becoming more sophisticated to support database administration, model user behavior, audit security, and route queries, but the methods rely on specialized feature engineering, and therefore must be carefully implemented and reimplemented for each SQL dialect, database system, and application. Meanwhile, the size and complexity of workloads are increasing as systems centralize in the cloud. We model workload analysis and management ta…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Snowflake Computing（斯诺flake计算公司）
We consider methods for learning vector representations of SQL queries to support generalized workload analytics tasks, including workload summarization for index selection and predicting queries that will trigger memory errors. We consider vector representations of both raw SQL text and optimized query plans, and evaluate these methods on synthetic and real SQL workloads. We find that general algorithms based on vector representations can outperform existing approaches that rely on specialized features. For index recommendation, we cluster the vector representations to compress large workload…
Among daily tasks of database administrators (DBAs), the analysis of query workloads to identify schema issues and improving performances is crucial. Although DBAs can easily pinpoint queries repeatedly causing performance issues, it remains challenging to automatically identify subsets of queries that share some properties only (a pattern) and simultaneously foster some target measures, such as execution time. Patterns are defined on combinations of query clauses, environment variables, database alerts and metrics and help answer questions like what makes SQL queries slow? What makes I/O comm…
Hadoop is emerging as the primary data hub in enterprises, and SQL represents the de facto language for data analysis. This combination has led to the development of a variety of SQL-on-Hadoop systems in use today. While the various SQL-on-Hadoop systems target the same class of analytical workloads, their different architectures, design decisions and implementations impact query performance. In this work, we perform a comparative analysis of four state-of-the-art SQL-on-Hadoop systems (Impala, Drill, Spark SQL and Phoenix) using the Web Data Analytics micro benchmark and the TPC-H benchmark o…
Query optimization is a hallmark of database systems enabling complex SQL queries of today's applications to be run efficiently. The query optimizer often fails to find the best plan, when logical subtleties in business queries and schemas circumvent it. When a query runs more expensively than is viable or warranted, determination of the performance issues is usually performed manually in consultation with experts through the analysis of query's execution plan (QEP). However, this is an excessively time consuming, human error-prone, and costly process. GALO is a novel system that automates thi…
A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL, called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation,…
The ability to estimate resource consumption of SQL queries is crucial for a number of tasks in a database system such as admission control, query scheduling and costing during query optimization. Recent work has explored the use of statistical techniques for resource estimation in place of the manually constructed cost models used in query optimization. Such techniques, which require as training data examples of resource usage in queries, offer the promise of superior estimation accuracy since they can account for factors such as hardware characteristics of the system or bias in cardinality e…
Querying a relational database is difficult because it requires users to know both the SQL language and be familiar with the schema. On the other hand, many users possess enough domain familiarity or expertise to describe their desired queries by alternative means. For such users, two major alternatives to writing SQL are natural language interfaces (NLIs) and programming-by-example (PBE). Both of these alternatives face certain pitfalls: natural language queries (NLQs) are often ambiguous, even for human interpreters, while current PBE approaches require either low-complexity queries, user sc…
With the advent of the Big Data era, it is usually computationally expensive to calculate the resource usages of a SQL query with traditional DBMS approaches. Can we estimate the cost of each query more efficiently without any computation in a SQL engine kernel? Can machine learning techniques help to estimate SQL query resource utilization? The answers are yes. We propose a SQL query cost predictor service, which employs machine learning techniques to train models from historical query request logs and rapidly forecasts the CPU and memory resource usages of online queries without any computat…
The need for modern data analytics to combine relational, procedural, and map-reduce-style functional processing is widely recognized. State-of-the-art systems like Spark have added SQL front-ends and relational query optimization, which promise an increase in expressiveness and performance. But how good are these extensions at extracting high performance from modern hardware platforms? While Spark has made impressive progress, we show that for relational workloads, there is still a significant gap compared with best-of-breed query engines. And when stepping outside of the relational world, qu…
For decades, RDBMSs have supported declarative SQL as well as imperative functions and procedures as ways for users to express data processing tasks. While the evaluation of declarative SQL has received a lot of attention resulting in highly sophisticated techniques, the evaluation of imperative programs has remained naive and highly inefficient. Imperative programs offer several benefits over SQL and hence are often preferred and widely used. But unfortunately, their abysmal performance discourages, and even prohibits their use in many situations. We address this important problem that has hi…
Commercial data analytics products such as Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse or Amazon Redshift provide ready-to-use scale-out database solutions for OLAP-style workloads in the cloud. While the provisioning of a database cluster is usually fully automated by cloud providers, customers typically still have to make important design decisions which were traditionally made by the database administrator such as selecting the partitioning schemes. In this paper we introduce a learned partitioning advisor for analytical OLAP-style workloads based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The main idea …
Real-time computation of data streams over affordable virtualized infrastructure resources is an important form of data in motion processing architecture. However, processing such data streams while ensuring strict guarantees on quality of services is problematic due to: (i) uncertain stream arrival pattern; (ii) need of processing different types of continuous queries; and (iii) variable resource consumption behavior of continuous queries. Recent work has explored the use of statistical techniques for resource estimation of SQL queries and OLTP workloads. All these techniques approximate reso…
Existing benchmarks for analytical database systems such as TPC-DS and TPC-H are designed for static reporting scenarios. The main metric of these benchmarks is the performance of running individual SQL queries over a synthetic database. In this paper, we argue that such benchmarks are not suitable for evaluating database workloads originating from interactive data exploration (IDE) systems where most queries are ad-hoc, not based on predefined reports, and built incrementally. As a main contribution, we present a novel benchmark called IDEBench that can be used to evaluate the performance of …
Most data analytical pipelines often encounter the problem of querying inconsistent data that violate pre-determined integrity constraints. Data cleaning is an extensively studied paradigm that singles out a consistent repair of the inconsistent data. Consistent query answering (CQA) is an alternative approach to data cleaning that asks for all tuples guaranteed to be returned by a given query on all (in most cases, exponentially many) repairs of the inconsistent data. This paper identifies a class of acyclic select-project-join (SPJ) queries for which CQA can be solved via SQL rewriting with …
Modern data science applications increasingly use heterogeneous data sources and analytics. This has led to growing interest in polystore systems, especially analytical polystores. In this work, we focus on emerging multi-data model analytics workloads over social media data that fluidly straddle relational, graph, and text analytics. Instead of a generic polystore, we build a "tri-store" system that is more aware of the underlying data models to better optimize execution to improve scalability and runtime efficiency. We name our system AWESOME (Analytics WorkbEnch for SOcial MEdia). It featur…
Modern RDBMSs support the ability to compress data using methods such as null suppression and dictionary encoding. Data compression offers the promise of significantly reducing storage requirements and improving I/O performance for decision support queries. However, compression can also slow down update and query performance due to the CPU costs of compression and decompression. In this paper, we study how data compression affects choice of appropriate physical database design, such as indexes, for a given workload. We observe that approaches that decouple the decision of whether or not to cho…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；GrabTaxi Holdings（GrabTaxi控股公司）
The use of deep learning models for forecasting the resource consumption patterns of SQL queries have recently been a popular area of study. With many companies using cloud platforms to power their data lakes for large scale analytic demands, these models form a critical part of the pipeline in managing cloud resource provisioning. While these models have demonstrated promising accuracy, training them over large scale industry workloads are expensive. Space inefficiencies of encoding techniques over large numbers of queries and excessive padding used to enforce shape consistency across diverse…
Real-time Workload Pattern Analysis for Large-scale Cloud Databases
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
