Demonstrating UDO: A Unified Approach for Optimizing Transaction Code, Physical Design, and System Parameters via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

UDO is a versatile tool for offline tuning of database systems for specific workloads. UDO can consider a variety of tuning choices, reaching from picking transaction code variants over index selections up to database system parameter tuning. UDO uses reinforcement learning to converge to near-optimal configurations, creating and evaluating different configurations via actual query executions (instead of relying on simplifying cost models). To cater to different parameter types, UDO distinguishes heavy parameters (which are expensive to change, e.g. physical design parameters) from light parameters. Specifically for optimizing heavy parameters, UDO uses reinforcement learning algorithms that allow delaying the point at which reward feedback becomes available. This gives us the freedom to optimize the point in time and the order in which different configurations are created and evaluated (by benchmarking a workload sample). UDO uses a cost-based planner to minimize configuration switching overheads. For instance, it aims to amortize the creation of expensive data structures by consecutively evaluating configurations using them. We demonstrate UDO on Postgres as well as MySQL and on TPC-H as well as TPC-C, optimizing a variety of light and heavy parameters concurrently.