Balsa: Learning a Query Optimizer Without Expert Demonstrations

Summary: Balsa uses deep RL to learn a query optimizer without expert demonstrations, from a simple simulator to safe real-execution fine-tuning. On Join Order Benchmark, it matches two expert optimizers after ~2 hours and beats them up to 2.8x with training. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 6337
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 9.5017232e-05
Overall Rank: 2,121 | 85.25%
DOI: 10.1145/3514221.3517885

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 52 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,880	RankPQO: Learning-to-Rank for Parametric Query Optimization	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,999	Towards Full Stack Adaptivity in Permissioned Blockchains	2024	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0040449103
71	How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?	2016	VLDB	0.00059038975
204	Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning	2019	CIDR	0.00034784455
333	Neo: A Learned Query Optimizer	2019	VLDB	0.00027206884
608	DeepDB: Learn from Data, not from Queries!	2020	VLDB	0.00019235898
640	Bao: Making Learned Query Optimization Practical	2021	SIGMOD	0.00018759152
758	Deep Unsupervised Cardinality Estimation	2020	VLDB	0.0001706608
806	An End-to-End Learning-based Cost Estimator	2020	VLDB	0.00016434274
910	NeuroCard: One Cardinality Estimator for All Tables	2021	VLDB	0.00015423056
1,254	Selectivity Estimation for Range Predicates using Lightweight Models	2019	VLDB	0.00013027411
1,427	Towards Scalable Dataframe Systems	2020	VLDB	0.0001204248
1,703	Are We Ready For Learned Cardinality Estimation?	2021	VLDB	0.00010836769
2,083	Towards a Learning Optimizer for Shared Clouds	2019	VLDB	9.5834572e-05
2,219	SkinnerDB: Regret-Bounded Query Evaluation via Reinforcement Learning	2019	SIGMOD	9.2623533e-05
3,076	Learning a Partitioning Advisor for Cloud Databases	2020	SIGMOD	7.6107677e-05
4,359	Astrid: Accurate Selectivity Estimation for String Predicates using Deep Learning	2021	VLDB	6.2569955e-05

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7,008	Is Your Learned Query Optimizer Behaving As You Expect? A Machine Learning Perspective	2024	VLDB	4.8643538e-05
6,040	Steering Query Optimizers: A Practical Take on Big Data Workloads	2021	SIGMOD	5.2412035e-05
5,371	LearnedSQLGen: Constraint-aware SQL Generation using Reinforcement Learning	2022	SIGMOD	5.5428776e-05
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10,630	Conformal Prediction for Verifiable Learned Query Optimization	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
5,640	AutoSteer: Learned Query Optimization for Any SQL Database	2023	VLDB	5.3933314e-05
2,156	SkinnerDB: Regret-Bounded Query Evaluation via Reinforcement Learning	2018	VLDB	9.4170209e-05
9,108	BASE: Bridging the Gap between Cost and Latency for Query Optimization	2023	VLDB	4.3950066e-05
640	Bao: Making Learned Query Optimization Practical	2021	SIGMOD	0.00018759152
3,658	Towards a Hands-Free Query Optimizer through Deep Learning	2019	CIDR	6.8704209e-05