arXiv subjects

Shi Qiao

Publications and source records attributed to Shi Qiao.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reverse Migration of Cloud Applications to On-premises

Cloud has become ubiquitous to modern applications due to its agility and scalability. However, regulated industries still prefer to deploy on-premises due to security and compliance reasons. This creates a paradox for vendors who need to develop in the cloud but deploy on-premises, leading to long release cycles and complex maintenance. In this paper, we present Diel, the Tursio On-premises Migrator, a tool that automates reverse migration of cloud applications to on-premises environments. Diel applies a combination of simulate, replicate, and delegate strategies to transform cloud services into on-premises counterparts. We describe the design and implementation of Diel, along with lessons learned from using it in practice. With Diel, we have been able to keep Tursio AI's cloud and on-premises versions in sync, releasing new stable versions every three weeks.

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arXiv2026

Guided Table Retrieval for Structured Data Search

Answering natural language questions over structured databases requires identifying the relevant tables and determining how to join them---a task that demands both schema knowledge and semantic understanding of the user's intent. We present guided table retrieval, a four-phase pipeline that combines deterministic grounding via hash-based predictors, structural exploration of join-graph reachability, LLM-powered disambiguation of sources and targets, and algorithmic merging into minimal, topologically ordered join trees. By decomposing the problem into phases with distinct responsibilities--- determinism, coverage, semantic reasoning, and coherence--- the pipeline avoids the brittleness of end-to-end LLM approaches while leveraging LLMs where their contextual judgment is most needed. We evaluate on BIRD-DEV and the enterprise-scale BEAVER benchmark, achieving 94% and 70% precision respectively, with 92% and 53% F1---substantially outperforming existing baselines on precision and F1 while producing exact join trees that can be directly consumed by downstream query compilers.

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arXiv2026

Tursio Database Search: How far are we from ChatGPT?

Business users need to search enterprise databases using natural language, just as they now search the web using ChatGPT or Perplexity. However, existing benchmarks -- designed for open-domain QA or text-to-SQL -- do not evaluate the end-to-end quality of such a search experience. We present an evaluation framework for structured database search that generates realistic banking queries across varying difficulty levels and assesses answer quality using relevance, safety, and conversational metrics via an LLM-as-judge approach. We apply this framework to compare Tursio, a database search platform, against ChatGPT and Perplexity on a credit union banking schema. Our results show that Tursio achieves answer relevancy statistically comparable to both baselines (97.8% vs. 98.1% on simple, 90.0% vs. 100.0% on medium, 89.5% vs. 100.0% on hard questions), even though Tursio answers from a structured database while the baselines generate responses from the open web. We analyze the failure modes, identify database completeness as the primary bottleneck, and outline directions for improving both the evaluation methodology and the systems under evaluation.

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arXiv2026

Tursio for Credit Unions: Structured Data Search with Automated Context Graphs

Extracting actionable insights from structured databases in regulated industries, such as credit unions, is often hindered by complex schemas, legacy systems, and stringent data governance requirements. We present Tursio, a secure, on-premises, database search platform that enables business users to query enterprise databases using natural language. Tursio automatically infers a context graph -- a schema-level metadata structure that captures join paths, column semantics, and domain annotations -- and uses it to systematically generate accurate query plans through LLM-assisted compilation, grounding, and rewriting. Unlike existing AI/BI tools that require extensive manual context curation, Tursio automates this end-to-end and deploys entirely on-premises. We demonstrate Tursio through realistic scenarios in the credit union domain, and discuss its applicability to other regulated settings.

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arXiv2026

Scalable Join Inference for Large Context Graphs

Context graphs are essential for modern AI applications including question answering, pattern discovery, and data analysis. Building accurate context graphs from structured databases requires inferring join relationships between entities. Invalid joins introduce ambiguity and duplicate records, compromising graph quality. We present a scalable join inference approach combining statistical pruning with Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. Unlike purely statistics-based methods, our hybrid approach mimics human semantic understanding while mitigating LLM hallucination through data-driven inference. We first identify primary key candidates and use LLMs for adjudication, then detect inclusion dependencies with the same two-stage process. This statistics-LLM combination scales to large schemas while maintaining accuracy and minimizing false positives. We further leverage the database query history to refine the join inferences over time as the query workloads evolve. Our evaluation on TPC-DS, TPC-H, BIRD-Dev, and production workloads demonstrates that the approach achieves high precision (78-100%) on well-structured schemas, while highlighting the inherent difficulty of join discovery in poorly normalized settings.

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arXiv2026

Making Databases Searchable with Deep Context

Databases are the most critical assets for enterprises, and yet they remain largely inaccessible to people who make the most important decisions. In this paper, we describe the Tursio search platform that builds an abstraction layer, aka semantic knowledge graph, over the underlying databases to make them searchable in natural language. Tursio infuses large language models (LLMs) into every part of the query processing stack, including data modeling, query compilation, query planning, and result reasoning. This allows Tursio to process natural language queries systematically using techniques from traditional query planning and rewriting, rather than black-box memorization. We describe the architecture of Tursio in detail and present a comprehensive evaluation on production workloads, and synthetic and realistic benchmarks. Our results show that Tursio achieves high accuracy while being efficient and scalable, making databases truly searchable for non-expert users.

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arXiv2025

Prompt Migration: Stabilizing GenAI Applications with Evolving Large Language Models

Generative AI is transforming business applications by enabling natural language interfaces and intelligent automation. However, the underlying large language models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly and so prompting them consistently is a challenge. This leads to inconsistent and unpredictable application behavior, undermining the reliability that businesses require for mission-critical workflows. In this paper, we introduce the concept of prompt migration as a systematic approach to stabilizing GenAI applications amid changing LLMs. Using the Tursio enterprise search application as a case study, we analyze the impact of successive GPT model upgrades, detail our migration framework including prompt redesign and a migration testbed, and demonstrate how these techniques restore application consistency. Our results show that structured prompt migration can fully recover the application reliability that was lost due to model drift. We conclude with practical lessons learned, emphasizing the need for prompt lifecycle management and robust testing to ensure dependable GenAI-powered business applications.

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arXiv2025

Searching Clinical Data Using Generative AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making a major impact on healthcare, particularly through its application in natural language processing (NLP) and predictive analytics. The healthcare sector has increasingly adopted AI for tasks such as clinical data analysis and medical code assignment. However, searching for clinical information in large and often unorganized datasets remains a manual and error-prone process. Assisting this process with automations can help physicians improve their operational productivity significantly. In this paper, we present a generative AI approach, coined SearchAI, to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of searching clinical data. Unlike traditional code assignment, which is a one-to-one problem, clinical data search is a one-to-many problem, i.e., a given search query can map to a family of codes. Healthcare professionals typically search for groups of related diseases, drugs, or conditions that map to many codes, and therefore, they need search tools that can handle keyword synonyms, semantic variants, and broad open-ended queries. SearchAI employs a hierarchical model that respects the coding hierarchy and improves the traversal of relationships from parent to child nodes. SearchAI navigates these hierarchies predictively and ensures that all paths are reachable without losing any relevant nodes. To evaluate the effectiveness of SearchAI, we conducted a series of experiments using both public and production datasets. Our results show that SearchAI outperforms default hierarchical traversals across several metrics, including accuracy, robustness, performance, and scalability. SearchAI can help make clinical data more accessible, leading to streamlined workflows, reduced administrative burden, and enhanced coding and diagnostic accuracy.

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arXiv2022

Deploying a Steered Query Optimizer in Production at Microsoft

Modern analytical workloads are highly heterogeneous and massively complex, making generic query optimizers untenable for many customers and scenarios. As a result, it is important to specialize these optimizers to instances of the workloads. In this paper, we continue a recent line of work in steering a query optimizer towards better plans for a given workload, and make major strides in pushing previous research ideas to production deployment. Along the way we solve several operational challenges including, making steering actions more manageable, keeping the costs of steering within budget, and avoiding unexpected performance regressions in production. Our resulting system, QQ-advisor, essentially externalizes the query planner to a massive offline pipeline for better exploration and specialization. We discuss various aspects of our design and show detailed results over production SCOPE workloads at Microsoft, where the system is currently enabled by default.

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arXiv2021

Optimal Resource Allocation for Serverless Queries

Optimizing resource allocation for analytical workloads is vital for reducing costs of cloud-data services. At the same time, it is incredibly hard for users to allocate resources per query in serverless processing systems, and they frequently misallocate by orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, prior work focused on predicting peak allocation while ignoring aggressive trade-offs between resource allocation and run-time. Additionally, these methods fail to predict allocation for queries that have not been observed in the past. In this paper, we tackle both these problems. We introduce a system for optimal resource allocation that can predict performance with aggressive trade-offs, for both new and past observed queries. We introduce the notion of a performance characteristic curve (PCC) as a parameterized representation that can compactly capture the relationship between resources and performance. To tackle training data sparsity, we introduce a novel data augmentation technique to efficiently synthesize the entire PCC using a single run of the query. Lastly, we demonstrate the advantages of a constrained loss function coupled with GNNs, over traditional ML methods, for capturing the domain specific behavior through an extensive experimental evaluation over SCOPE big data workloads at Microsoft.

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arXiv2020

Cost Models for Big Data Query Processing: Learning, Retrofitting, and Our Findings

Query processing over big data is ubiquitous in modern clouds, where the system takes care of picking both the physical query execution plans and the resources needed to run those plans, using a cost-based query optimizer. A good cost model, therefore, is akin to better resource efficiency and lower operational costs. Unfortunately, the production workloads at Microsoft show that costs are very complex to model for big data systems. In this work, we investigate two key questions: (i) can we learn accurate cost models for big data systems, and (ii) can we integrate the learned models within the query optimizer. To answer these, we make three core contributions. First, we exploit workload patterns to learn a large number of individual cost models and combine them to achieve high accuracy and coverage over a long period. Second, we propose extensions to Cascades framework to pick optimal resources, i.e, number of containers, during query planning. And third, we integrate the learned cost models within the Cascade-style query optimizer of SCOPE at Microsoft. We evaluate the resulting system, Cleo, in a production environment using both production and TPC-H workloads. Our results show that the learned cost models are 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more accurate, and 20X more correlated with the actual runtimes, with a large majority (70%) of the plan changes leading to substantial improvements in latency as well as resource usage.

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arXiv2015

One Size Does not Fit All: When to Use Signature-based Pruning to Improve Template Matching for RDF graphs

Signature-based pruning is broadly accepted as an effective way to improve query performance of graph template matching on general labeled graphs. Most existing techniques which utilize signature-based pruning claim its benefits on all datasets and queries. However, the effectiveness of signature-based pruning varies greatly among different RDF datasets and highly related with their dataset characteristics. We observe that the performance benefits from signature-based pruning depend not only on the size of the RDF graphs, but also the underlying graph structure and the complexity of queries. This motivates us to propose a flexible RDF querying framework, called RDF-h, which selectively utilizes signature-based pruning by evaluating the characteristics of RDF datasets and query templates. Scalability and efficiency of RDF-h is demonstrated in experimental results using both real and synthetic datasets. Keywords: RDF, Graph Template Matching, Signature-based Pruning

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