Can Large Language Models Be Query Optimizer for Relational Databases?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Tan, Jie, Zhao, Kangfei, Li, Rui, Yu, Jeffrey Xu, Piao, Chengzhi, Cheng, Hong, Meng, Helen, Zhao, Deli, Rong, Yu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Tan, Jie
Zhao, Kangfei
Li, Rui
Yu, Jeffrey Xu
Piao, Chengzhi
Cheng, Hong
Meng, Helen
Zhao, Deli
Rong, Yu
author_facet Tan, Jie
Zhao, Kangfei
Li, Rui
Yu, Jeffrey Xu
Piao, Chengzhi
Cheng, Hong
Meng, Helen
Zhao, Deli
Rong, Yu
contents Query optimization, which finds the optimized execution plan for a given query, is a complex planning and decision-making problem within the exponentially growing plan space in database management systems (DBMS). Traditional optimizers heavily rely on a certain cost model constructed by various heuristics and empirical tuning, probably leading to generating suboptimal plans. Recent developments of Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in solving complex planning and decision-making problems, such as arithmetic and programmatic tasks. In this paper, we try to explore the potential of LLMs in handling query optimization and propose a tentative LLM-based query optimizer dubbed LLM-QO, established on PostgreSQL's execution engine. In LLM-QO, we formulate query optimization in an autoregressive fashion which directly generates the execution plan without explicit plan enumeration. To investigate the essential input of LLM-QO, we design a customized data recipe named QInstruct to collect the training data from various optimizers and serialize the database's meta data, queries and corresponding plans into a textual format. Based on QInstruct, we implement a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline, Query Instruction Tuning (QIT) and Query Direct Preference Optimization (QDPO), to empower the capability of general-purpose LLMs in handling query optimization. In our experiments, LLM-QO can generate valid and high-quality plans and consistently outperforms both traditional and learned optimizers on three query workloads. Our findings verify that LLMs can be derived as query optimizers where generalization, efficiency and adaptivity deserve further research efforts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05562
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Large Language Models Be Query Optimizer for Relational Databases?
Tan, Jie
Zhao, Kangfei
Li, Rui
Yu, Jeffrey Xu
Piao, Chengzhi
Cheng, Hong
Meng, Helen
Zhao, Deli
Rong, Yu
Databases
Query optimization, which finds the optimized execution plan for a given query, is a complex planning and decision-making problem within the exponentially growing plan space in database management systems (DBMS). Traditional optimizers heavily rely on a certain cost model constructed by various heuristics and empirical tuning, probably leading to generating suboptimal plans. Recent developments of Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in solving complex planning and decision-making problems, such as arithmetic and programmatic tasks. In this paper, we try to explore the potential of LLMs in handling query optimization and propose a tentative LLM-based query optimizer dubbed LLM-QO, established on PostgreSQL's execution engine. In LLM-QO, we formulate query optimization in an autoregressive fashion which directly generates the execution plan without explicit plan enumeration. To investigate the essential input of LLM-QO, we design a customized data recipe named QInstruct to collect the training data from various optimizers and serialize the database's meta data, queries and corresponding plans into a textual format. Based on QInstruct, we implement a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline, Query Instruction Tuning (QIT) and Query Direct Preference Optimization (QDPO), to empower the capability of general-purpose LLMs in handling query optimization. In our experiments, LLM-QO can generate valid and high-quality plans and consistently outperforms both traditional and learned optimizers on three query workloads. Our findings verify that LLMs can be derived as query optimizers where generalization, efficiency and adaptivity deserve further research efforts.
title Can Large Language Models Be Query Optimizer for Relational Databases?
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05562