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)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Zongheng Yang (University of California Berkeley)
- 2. Wei-Lin Chiang (University of California Berkeley)
- 3. Sifei Luan (University of California Berkeley)
- 4. Gautam Mittal (University of California Berkeley)
- 5. Michael Luo (University of California Berkeley)
- 6. Ion Stoica (University of California Berkeley)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{yang_sigmod22,
title = {{Balsa: Learning a Query Optimizer Without Expert Demonstrations}},
author = {Yang, Zongheng and Chiang, Wei-Lin and Luan, Sifei and Mittal, Gautam and Luo, Michael and Stoica, Ion},
series = {{SIGMOD} '22},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/3514221.3517885},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3514221.3517885},
year = {2022}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 7 of 57 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,969 | Improving DBMS Scheduling Decisions with Accurate Performance Prediction on Concurrent Queries | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,001 | veDB-HTAP: a Highly Integrated, Efficient and Adaptive HTAP System | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,065 | Learned Cost Models for Query Optimization: From Batch to Streaming Systems | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,083 | Graph Transformers for Query Plan Representation: Potentials and Challenges | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,091 | LEAP: A Low-cost Spark SQL Query Optimizer using Pairwise Comparison | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,103 | RankPQO: Learning-to-Rank for Parametric Query Optimization | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,210 | Towards Full Stack Adaptivity in Permissioned Blockchains | 2024 | VLDB | 5.093636e-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.
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