DBScholar

Back to papers

Bao: Making Learned Query Optimization Practical

Summary: Bao is a bandit-based learned optimizer atop optimizers, offering per-query hints via Thompson sampling and tree-CNNs. Adapts to workload, data, and schema changes, improving end-to-end and tail latency; cloud tests show cost reductions and stronger performance. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
h840803224e5b1dd4
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2021
Pagerank
0.00019989474
Overall Rank
362 | 97.57%
DOI
10.1145/3448016.3452838

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{marcus_sigmod21,
        title = {{Bao: Making Learned Query Optimization Practical}},
        author = {Marcus, Ryan and Negi, Parimarjan and Mao, Hongzi and Tatbul, Nesime and Alizadeh, Mohammad and Kraska, Tim},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '21},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3448016.3452838},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3448016.3452838},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 130 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,199 Balsa: Learning a Query Optimizer Without Expert Demonstrations 2022 SIGMOD 0.00011563985
1,515 DSB: A Decision Support Benchmark for Workload-Driven and Traditional Database Systems 2021 VLDB 0.00010417728
2,210 Lero: A Learning-to-Rank Query Optimizer 2023 VLDB 8.8257742e-05
2,250 QueryFormer: A Tree Transformer Model for Query Plan Representation 2022 VLDB 8.7533306e-05
2,395 A Learned Query Rewrite System using Monte Carlo Tree Search 2022 VLDB 8.5281914e-05
2,636 Are Updatable Learned Indexes Ready? 2022 VLDB 8.1941043e-05
2,690 Cost-based or Learning-based? A Hybrid Query Optimizer for Query Plan Selection 2022 VLDB 8.1258173e-05
2,885 Zero-Shot Cost Models for Out-of-the-box Learned Cost Prediction 2022 VLDB 7.9094988e-05
3,327 Robust Query Driven Cardinality Estimation under Changing Workloads 2023 VLDB 7.4207879e-05
3,487 LOGER: A Learned Optimizer towards Generating Efficient and Robust Query Execution Plans 2023 VLDB 7.263041e-05
3,563 Auto-WLM: Machine Learning Enhanced Workload Management in Amazon Redshift 2023 SIGMOD 7.2042148e-05
3,590 Make Your Database System Dream of Electric Sheep: Towards Self-Driving Operation 2021 VLDB 7.1865343e-05
3,777 HTAP Databases: What is New and What is Next 2022 SIGMOD 7.0268163e-05
3,949 Deploying a Steered Query Optimizer in Production at Microsoft 2022 SIGMOD 6.9052796e-05
4,108 QueryBooster: Improving SQL Performance Using Middleware Services for Human-Centered Query Rewriting 2023 VLDB 6.8020689e-05
4,132 SQLStorm: Taking Database Benchmarking into the LLM Era 2025 VLDB 6.7885553e-05
4,202 Kepler: Robust Learning for Faster Parametric Query Optimization 2023 SIGMOD 6.7374091e-05
4,258 LEON: A New Framework for ML-Aided Query Optimization 2023 VLDB 6.6994722e-05
4,468 Real-time Workload Pattern Analysis for Large-scale Cloud Databases 2023 VLDB 6.5863349e-05
4,666 Intelligent Scaling in Amazon Redshift 2024 SIGMOD 6.479878e-05
4,683 AutoSteer: Learned Query Optimization for Any SQL Database 2023 VLDB 6.4716143e-05
4,711 Learned Index Benefits: Machine Learning Based Index Performance Estimation 2022 VLDB 6.4573842e-05
4,890 Can Learned Models Replace Hash Functions? 2023 VLDB 6.3682031e-05
5,039 Leveraging Query Logs and Machine Learning for Parametric Query Optimization 2022 VLDB 6.3023214e-05
5,041 LSched: A Workload-Aware Learned Query Scheduler for Analytical Database Systems 2022 SIGMOD 6.3006152e-05
5,214 Stage: Query Execution Time Prediction in Amazon Redshift 2024 SIGMOD 6.2248104e-05
5,241 FASTgres: Making Learned Query Optimizer Hinting Effective 2023 VLDB 6.2154384e-05
5,425 Efficient Massively Parallel Join Optimization for Large Queries* 2022 SIGMOD 6.1349269e-05
5,456 Eraser: Eliminating Performance Regression on Learned Query Optimizer 2024 VLDB 6.1239873e-05
5,481 A Comparative Study and Component Analysis of Query Plan Representation Techniques in ML4DB Studies 2024 VLDB 6.1125124e-05
5,649 Sample-Efficient Cardinality Estimation Using Geometric Deep Learning 2024 VLDB 6.052326e-05
5,674 HMAB: Self-Driving Hierarchy of Bandits for Integrated Physical Database Design Tuning 2023 VLDB 6.0430252e-05
5,683 How Good are Learned Cost Models, Really? Insights from Query Optimization Tasks 2025 SIGMOD 6.0392183e-05
5,716 Detect, Distill and Update: Learned DB Systems Facing Out of Distribution Data 2023 SIGMOD 6.0194657e-05
5,788 Lemo: A Cache-Enhanced Learned Optimizer for Concurrent Queries 2023 SIGMOD 5.9947442e-05
5,865 Modeling Shifting Workloads for Learned Database Systems 2024 SIGMOD 5.9659203e-05
5,871 PilotScope: Steering Databases with Machine Learning Drivers 2024 VLDB 5.9639223e-05
5,908 Quantum-Inspired Digital Annealing for Join Ordering 2024 VLDB 5.9506986e-05
5,974 Towards instance-optimized data systems 2021 VLDB 5.9305575e-05
6,308 Is Your Learned Query Optimizer Behaving As You Expect? A Machine Learning Perspective 2024 VLDB 5.8177833e-05
6,586 Can Large Language Models Be Query Optimizer for Relational Databases? 2026 SIGMOD 5.7430662e-05
6,632 Join Order Selection with Deep Reinforcement Learning: Fundamentals, Techniques, and Challenges 2023 VLDB 5.7270153e-05
6,660 Speeding Up End-to-end Query Execution via Learning-based Progressive Cardinality Estimation 2023 SIGMOD 5.7178404e-05
6,710 Simple Adaptive Query Processing vs. Learned Query Optimizers: Observations and Analysis 2023 VLDB 5.7019157e-05
6,791 dbET: Execution Time Distribution-based Plan Selection 2023 SIGMOD 5.6811782e-05
6,818 ASM: Harmonizing Autoregressive Model, Sampling, and Multi-dimensional Statistics Merging for Cardinality Estimation 2024 SIGMOD 5.672718e-05
7,033 Rethinking Learned Cost Models: Why Start from Scratch? 2023 SIGMOD 5.6168499e-05
7,070 E2ETune: End-to-End Knob Tuning via Fine-tuned Generative Language Model 2025 VLDB 5.6080535e-05
7,157 Sibyl: Forecasting Time-Evolving Query Workloads 2024 SIGMOD 5.5972283e-05
7,201 Coresets over Multiple Tables for Feature-rich and Data-efficient Machine Learning 2023 VLDB 5.5871656e-05
Previous Page 1 / 3 Next

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 20 of 20 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 0.0023947656
15 How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really? 2016 VLDB 0.00061066921
40 The Case for Learned Index Structures 2018 SIGMOD 0.00046284649
85 Learned Cardinalities: Estimating Correlated Joins with Deep Learning 2019 CIDR 0.00035864347
98 LEO - DB2's LEarning Optimizer 2001 VLDB 0.00034106982
145 Neo: A Learned Query Optimizer 2019 VLDB 0.0002908188
224 Self-Driving Database Management Systems 2017 CIDR 0.00024013745
406 Deep Unsupervised Cardinality Estimation 2020 VLDB 0.00019045544
461 An End-to-End Learning-based Cost Estimator 2020 VLDB 0.00017829982
512 NeuroCard: One Cardinality Estimator for All Tables 2021 VLDB 0.00017050173
555 SageDB: A Learned Database System 2019 CIDR 0.00016506678
560 Plan-Structured Deep Neural Network Models for Query Performance Prediction 2019 VLDB 0.00016403151
682 Robust Estimation of Resource Consumption for SQL Queries using Statistical Techniques 2012 VLDB 0.0001481781
1,156 QuickSel: Quick Selectivity Learning with Mixture Models 2020 SIGMOD 0.00011777105
1,279 AI Meets AI: Leveraging Query Executions to Improve Index Recommendations 2019 SIGMOD 0.00011226878
1,800 SkinnerDB: Regret-Bounded Query Evaluation via Reinforcement Learning 2018 VLDB 9.6093317e-05
1,842 On Predictive Modeling for Optimizing Transaction Execution in Parallel OLTP Systems 2012 VLDB 9.526552e-05
2,550 SQLShare: Results from a Multi-Year SQL-as-a-Service Experiment 2016 SIGMOD 8.3121033e-05
4,059 Database-Agnostic Workload Management 2019 CIDR 6.8251711e-05
5,087 Releasing Cloud Databases from the Chains of Performance Prediction Models 2017 CIDR 6.2809904e-05
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 11,177 Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries 2025 SIGMOD
2 4,968 Budget-aware Index Tuning with Reinforcement Learning 2022 SIGMOD
3 9,276 BASE: Bridging the Gap between Cost and Latency for Query Optimization 2023 VLDB
4 10,802 BaCon: Efficient Batch Processing of Counting Queries 2026 VLDB
5 3,060 Towards a Hands-Free Query Optimizer through Deep Learning 2019 CIDR
6 9,670 Low Rank Learning for Offline Query Optimization 2025 SIGMOD
7 5,110 Steering Query Optimizers: A Practical Take on Big Data Workloads 2021 SIGMOD
8 8,332 Learned Offline Query Planning via Bayesian Optimization 2025 SIGMOD
9 1,199 Balsa: Learning a Query Optimizer Without Expert Demonstrations 2022 SIGMOD
10 4,683 AutoSteer: Learned Query Optimization for Any SQL Database 2023 VLDB