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Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres

702 points · 144 comments · polyphilz

  1. Someone · · focus · HN ↗
    > I paid ~$800 to rent a 2x H100 SXM node from Lambda for ~95 hours, and ~$400 in OpenAI API fees to generate the Astra trajectory demonstrations.

    > a tiny 4B model went from not being able to understand the harness it was wrapped in, to achieving a 1.81x geometric mean speedup and a summed latency decrease of 44.7% across a workload of join-heavy SQL queries

    I can’t find it in the article (may have skimmed it too much), but I suspect they didn’t include those ~95 hours in the benchmark numbers.

    I think all database vendors know their query optimizers could do much better if they could afford to spend lots of time to derive query plans.

    ⇒ this may be useful for some workloads, but even then, can you afford to spend hours every now and then to update your 4B model to ensure it still picks a good query plan?

    1. vatsachak · · focus · HN ↗
      I think the idea would be making a frontier model that does this. One that is trained on multiple queries
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