Hit the Gym: Accelerating Query Execution to Efficiently Bootstrap Behavior Models for Self-Driving Database Management Systems

Abstract

Autonomous database management systems (DBMSs) aim to optimize themselves automatically without human guidance. They rely on machine learning (ML) models that predict their run-time behavior to evaluate whether a candidate configuration is beneficial without the expensive execution of queries. However, the high cost of collecting the training data to build these models makes them impractical for real-world deployments. Furthermore, these models are instance-specific and thus require retraining whenever the DBMS's environment changes. State-of-the-art methods spend over 93% of their time running queries for training versus tuning. To mitigate this problem, we present the Boot framework for automatically accelerating training data collection in DBMSs. Boot utilizes macro- and micro-acceleration (MMA) techniques that modify query execution semantics with approximate run-time telemetry and skip repetitive parts of the training process. To evaluate Boot, we integrated it into a database gym for PostgreSQL. Our experimental evaluation shows that Boot reduces training collection times by up to 268× with modest degradation in model accuracy. These results also indicate that our MMA-based approach scales with dataset size and workload complexity.