arXiv subjects

Tiemo Bang

Publications and source records attributed to Tiemo Bang.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Case for Cardinality Lower Bounds

Despite decades of research, cardinality estimation remains the optimizer's Achilles heel, with industrial-strength systems exhibiting a systemic tendency toward underestimation. At cloud scale, this is a severe production vulnerability: in Microsoft's Fabric Data Warehouse (DW), a mere 0.05% of extreme underestimates account for 95% of all CPU under-allocation, causing preventable slowdowns for thousands of queries daily. Yet recent theoretical work on provable upper bounds only corrects overestimation, leaving the more harmful problem of underestimation unaddressed. We argue that closing this gap is an urgent priority for the database community. As a vital step toward this goal, we introduce xBound, the first theoretical framework for computing provable join size lower bounds. By clipping the optimizer's estimates from below, xBound offers strict mathematical safety nets demanded by production systems - using only a handful of lightweight base table statistics. We demonstrate xBound's practical impact on Fabric DW: on the StackOverflow-CEB benchmark, it corrects 23.6% of Fabric DW's underestimates, yielding end-to-end query speedups of up to 20.1x, demonstrating that even a first step toward provable lower bounds can deliver meaningful production gains and motivating the community to further pursue this critical, open direction.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

GRACEFUL: A Learned Cost Estimator For UDFs

User-Defined-Functions (UDFs) are a pivotal feature in modern DBMS, enabling the extension of native DBMS functionality with custom logic. However, the integration of UDFs into query optimization processes poses significant challenges, primarily due to the difficulty of estimating UDF execution costs. Consequently, existing cost models in DBMS optimizers largely ignore UDFs or rely on static assumptions, resulting in suboptimal performance for queries involving UDFs. In this paper, we introduce GRACEFUL, a novel learned cost model to make accurate cost predictions of query plans with UDFs enabling optimization decisions for UDFs in DBMS. For example, as we show in our evaluation, using our cost model, we can achieve 50x speedups through informed pull-up/push-down filter decisions of the UDF compared to the standard case where always a filter push-down is applied. Additionally, we release a synthetic dataset of over 90,000 UDF queries to promote further research in this area.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

SkyStore: Cost-Optimized Object Storage Across Regions and Clouds

Modern applications span multiple clouds to reduce costs, avoid vendor lock-in, and leverage low-availability resources in another cloud. However, standard object stores operate within a single cloud, forcing users to manually manage data placement across clouds, i.e., navigate their diverse APIs and handle heterogeneous costs for network and storage. This is often a complex choice: users must either pay to store objects in a remote cloud, or pay to transfer them over the network based on application access patterns and cloud provider cost offerings. To address this, we present SkyStore, a unified object store that addresses cost-optimal data management across regions and clouds. SkyStore introduces a virtual object and bucket API to hide the complexity of interacting with multiple clouds. At its core, SkyStore has a novel TTL-based data placement policy that dynamically replicates and evicts objects according to application access patterns while optimizing for lower cost. Our evaluation shows that across various workloads, SkyStore reduces the overall cost by up to 6x over academic baselines and commercial alternatives like AWS multi-region buckets. SkyStore also has comparable latency, and its availability and fault tolerance are on par with standard cloud offerings. We release the data and code of SkyStore at https://github.com/skyplane-project/skystore.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Optimizing the cloud? Don't train models. Build oracles!

We propose cloud oracles, an alternative to machine learning for online optimization of cloud configurations. Our cloud oracle approach guarantees complete accuracy and explainability of decisions for problems that can be formulated as parametric convex optimizations. We give experimental evidence of this technique's efficacy and share a vision of research directions for expanding its applicability.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

AnyDB: An Architecture-less DBMS for Any Workload

In this paper, we propose a radical new approach for scale-out distributed DBMSs. Instead of hard-baking an architectural model, such as a shared-nothing architecture, into the distributed DBMS design, we aim for a new class of so-called architecture-less DBMSs. The main idea is that an architecture-less DBMS can mimic any architecture on a per-query basis on-the-fly without any additional overhead for reconfiguration. Our initial results show that our architecture-less DBMS AnyDB can provide significant speed-ups across varying workloads compared to a traditional DBMS implementing a static architecture.

cs.DB↗