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: 6338
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 0.00011100806
Overall Rank: 1,371 | 90.48%
DOI: 10.1145/3514221.3517885

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 53 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,872	LEAP: A Low-cost Spark SQL Query Optimizer using Pairwise Comparison	2025	VLDB	5.1725247e-05
10,884	RankPQO: Learning-to-Rank for Parametric Query Optimization	2025	VLDB	5.1725247e-05
11,002	Towards Full Stack Adaptivity in Permissioned Blockchains	2024	VLDB	5.1725247e-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	0.0024179717
20	How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?	2016	VLDB	0.00058294381
86	Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning	2019	CIDR	0.0003577267
157	Neo: A Learned Query Optimizer	2019	VLDB	0.00028782395
328	DeepDB: Learn from Data, not from Queries!	2020	VLDB	0.00021121613
394	Bao: Making Learned Query Optimization Practical	2021	SIGMOD	0.00019400224
411	Deep Unsupervised Cardinality Estimation	2020	VLDB	0.00019014394
462	An End-to-End Learning-based Cost Estimator	2020	VLDB	0.0001813892
524	NeuroCard: One Cardinality Estimator for All Tables	2021	VLDB	0.00017177356
715	Selectivity Estimation for Range Predicates using Lightweight Models	2019	VLDB	0.0001480646
1,053	Are We Ready For Learned Cardinality Estimation?	2021	VLDB	0.00012504851
1,417	Towards Scalable Dataframe Systems	2020	VLDB	0.00010936782
1,468	Towards a Learning Optimizer for Shared Clouds	2019	VLDB	0.00010750589
1,711	SkinnerDB: Regret-Bounded Query Evaluation via Reinforcement Learning	2019	SIGMOD	0.00010036767
2,489	Learning a Partitioning Advisor for Cloud Databases	2020	SIGMOD	8.5846547e-05
3,525	Astrid: Accurate Selectivity Estimation for String Predicates using Deep Learning	2021	VLDB	7.4076098e-05

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6,433	Is Your Learned Query Optimizer Behaving As You Expect? A Machine Learning Perspective	2024	VLDB	5.9423732e-05
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4,858	AutoSteer: Learned Query Optimization for Any SQL Database	2023	VLDB	6.5410955e-05
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