How Good are Learned Cost Models, Really? Insights from Query Optimization Tasks
Summary: Systematic evaluation of Learned Cost Models for query optimization across main tasks: join ordering, access path, and operator choice. Seven LCMs vs traditional models; surprisingly, traditional cost models often beat LCMs, guiding future work. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
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Authors
- 1. Roman Heinrich (German National Research Center for Information Technology; Technical University of Darmstadt)
- 2. Manisha Luthra (German National Research Center for Information Technology; Technical University of Darmstadt)
- 3. Johannes Wehrstein (Technical University of Darmstadt)
- 4. Harald Kornmayer (Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University)
- 5. Carsten Binnig (German National Research Center for Information Technology; Technical University of Darmstadt)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{heinrich_sigmod25,
title = {{How Good are Learned Cost Models, Really? Insights from Query Optimization Tasks}},
author = {Heinrich, Roman and Luthra, Manisha and Wehrstein, Johannes and Kornmayer, Harald and Binnig, Carsten},
series = {{SIGMOD} '25},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/3725309},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3725309},
year = {2025}
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