Haoyang Li

Yiyan Li, Haoyang Li, Zhao Pu et al.

Knob tuning plays a crucial role in optimizing databases by adjusting knobs to enhance database performance. However, traditional tuning methods often follow a Try-Collect-Adjust approach, proving inefficient and database-specific. Moreover, these methods are often opaque, making it challenging for DBAs to grasp the underlying decision-making process. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Claude-3 has excelled in complex natural language tasks, yet their potential in database knob tuning remains largely unexplored. This study harnesses LLMs as experienced DBAs for knob-tuning tasks with carefully designed prompts. We identify three key subtasks in the tuning system: knob pruning, model initialization, and knob recommendation, proposing LLM-driven solutions to replace conventional methods for each subtask. We conduct extensive experiments to compare LLM-driven approaches against traditional methods across the subtasks to evaluate LLMs' efficacy in the knob tuning domain. Furthermore, we explore the adaptability of LLM-based solutions in diverse evaluation settings, encompassing new benchmarks, database engines, and hardware environments. Our findings reveal that LLMs not only match or surpass traditional methods but also exhibit notable interpretability by generating responses in a coherent ``chain-of-thought'' manner. We further observe that LLMs exhibit remarkable generalizability through simple adjustments in prompts, eliminating the necessity for additional training or extensive code modifications. Drawing insights from our experimental findings, we identify several opportunities for future research aimed at advancing the utilization of LLMs in the realm of database management.

Xinmei Huang, Haoyang Li, Jing Zhang et al. · pku

Database knob tuning is a significant challenge for database administrators, as it involves tuning a large number of configuration knobs with continuous or discrete values to achieve optimal database performance. Traditional methods, such as manual tuning or learning-based approaches, typically require numerous workload replays and are both time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address this challenge, we introduce E2ETune, an end-to-end knob tuner powered by a fine-tuned generative language model. The key idea is to leverage the exceptional sequence-to-sequence modeling capabilities of generative language models to capture the complex mapping between workloads (inputs) and their corresponding promising configurations (outputs). To achieve this goal, we propose a novel data generation framework to efficiently produce a large amount of training data, where each data sample consists of a workload and its promising configuration. Then, these data are used to fine-tune a generative language model, yielding an end-to-end knob tuner. This tuner offers out-of-the-box configuration recommendations for new workloads. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate E2ETune's efficiency and effectiveness using 10 representative and 3 real-world benchmarks. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, E2ETune can identify competitive configurations in significantly less time.

Xinxin Zhao, Haoyang Li, Jing Zhang et al.

Index recommendation is essential for improving query performance in database management systems (DBMSs) through creating an optimal set of indexes under specific constraints. Traditional methods, such as heuristic and learning-based approaches, are effective but face challenges like lengthy recommendation time, resource-intensive training, and poor generalization across different workloads and database schemas. To address these issues, we propose LLMIdxAdvis, a resource-efficient index advisor that uses large language models (LLMs) without extensive fine-tuning. LLMIdxAdvis frames index recommendation as a sequence-to-sequence task, taking target workload, storage constraint, and corresponding database environment as input, and directly outputting recommended indexes. It constructs a high-quality demonstration pool offline, using GPT-4-Turbo to synthesize diverse SQL queries and applying integrated heuristic methods to collect both default and refined labels. During recommendation, these demonstrations are ranked to inject database expertise via in-context learning. Additionally, LLMIdxAdvis extracts workload features involving specific column statistical information to strengthen LLM's understanding, and introduces a novel inference scaling strategy combining vertical scaling (via ''Index-Guided Major Voting'' and Best-of-N) and horizontal scaling (through iterative ''self-optimization'' with database feedback) to enhance reliability. Experiments on 3 OLAP and 2 real-world benchmarks reveal that LLMIdxAdvis delivers competitive index recommendation with reduced runtime, and generalizes effectively across different workloads and database schemas.