PLM4NDV: Minimizing Data Access for Number of Distinct Values Estimation with Pre-trained Language Models
This work addresses data access inefficiencies in database management for tasks like query optimization, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NDV estimation methods by incorporating semantic insights.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating the Number of Distinct Values (NDV) in database columns by leveraging semantic schema information with Pre-trained Language Models, reducing data access costs and providing accurate estimates, even without data access, as shown in experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset.
Number of Distinct Values (NDV) estimation of a multiset/column is a basis for many data management tasks, especially within databases. Despite decades of research, most existing methods require either a significant amount of samples through uniform random sampling or access to the entire column to produce estimates, leading to substantial data access costs and potentially ineffective estimations in scenarios with limited data access. In this paper, we propose leveraging semantic information, i.e., schema, to address these challenges. The schema contains rich semantic information that can benefit the NDV estimation. To this end, we propose PLM4NDV, a learned method incorporating Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to extract semantic schema information for NDV estimation. Specifically, PLM4NDV leverages the semantics of the target column and the corresponding table to gain a comprehensive understanding of the column's meaning. By using the semantics, PLM4NDV reduces data access costs, provides accurate NDV estimation, and can even operate effectively without any data access. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset demonstrate the superiority of PLM4NDV over baseline methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/plm4ndv.