AI for Systems: Using LLMs to Optimize Database Query Execution

Together AI · 3 months ago

Researchers developed DBPlanBench, a system that uses LLMs to optimize database query execution plans by identifying and fixing inefficiencies in join ordering and filtering strategies. The system achieved a 4.78x speedup on a complex test query and optimized 60.8% of sampled queries by more than 5%, using a compact JSON serialization that reduces plan representations by approximately 10x. The approach enables databases to improve query performance without modifying the underlying database engine, and optimizations discovered on small-scale test databases successfully transfer to larger production-scale databases.