Databases for OLTP are often the backbone for applications such as hotel room or cinema ticket booking applications. However, developing a conversational agent (i.e., a chatbot-like interface) to allow end-users to interact with an application using natural language requires both immense amounts of training data and NLP expertise. This motivates CAT , which can be used to easily create conversational agents for transactional databases. The main idea is that, for a given OLTP database, CAT uses weak supervision to synthesize the required training data to train a state-of-the-art conversational agent, allowing users to interact with the OLTP database. Furthermore, CAT provides an out-of-the-box integration of the resulting agent with the database. As a major difference to existing conversational agents, agents synthesized by CAT are data-aware. This means that the agent decides which information should be requested from the user based on the current data distributions in the database, which typically results in markedly more efficient dialogues compared with non-data-aware agents. We publish the code for CAT as open source.

In this paper, we introduce zero-shot cost models, which enable learned cost estimation that generalizes to unseen databases. In contrast to state-of-the-art workload-driven approaches, which require to execute a large set of training queries on every new database, zero-shot cost models thus allow to instantiate a learned cost model out-of-the-box without expensive training data collection. To enable such zero-shot cost models, we suggest a new learning paradigm based on pre-trained cost models. As core contributions to support the transfer of such a pre-trained cost model to unseen databases, we introduce a new model architecture and representation technique for encoding query workloads as input to those models. As we will show in our evaluation, zero-shot cost estimation can provide more accurate cost estimates than state-of-the-art models for a wide range of (real-world) databases without requiring any query executions on unseen databases. Furthermore, we show that zero-shot cost models can be used in a few-shot mode that further improves their quality by retraining them just with a small number of additional training queries on the unseen database.

Classical approaches for OLAP assume that the data of all tables is complete. However, in case of incomplete tables with missing tuples, classical approaches fail since the result of a SQL aggregate query might significantly differ from the results computed on the full dataset. Today, the only way to deal with missing data is to manually complete the dataset which causes not only high efforts but also requires good statistical skills to determine when a dataset is actually complete. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for relational data completion called ReStore using a new class of (neural) schema-structured completion models that are able to synthesize data which resembles the missing tuples. As we show in our evaluation, this efficiently helps to reduce the relative error of aggregate queries by up to 390% on real-world data compared to using the incomplete data directly for query answering.

Cloud vendors provide ready-to-use distributed DBMS solutions as a service. While the provisioning of a DBMS is usually fully automated, customers typically still have to make important design decisions which were traditionally made by the database administrator such as finding an optimal partitioning scheme for a given database schema and workload. In this paper, we introduce a new learned partitioning advisor based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for OLAP-style workloads. The main idea is that a DRL agent learns the cost tradeoffs of different partitioning schemes and can thus automate the partitioning decision. In the evaluation, we show that our advisor is able to find non-trivial partitionings for a wide range of workloads and outperforms more classical approaches for automated partitioning design.

The typical approach for learned DBMS components is to capture the behavior by running a representative set of queries and use the observations to train a machine learning model. This workload-driven approach, however, has two major downsides. First, collecting the training data can be very expensive, since all queries need to be executed on potentially large databases. Second, training data has to be recollected when the workload or the database changes. To overcome these limitations, we take a different route and propose a new data-driven approach for learned DBMS components which directly supports changes of the workload and data without the need of retraining. Indeed, one may now expect that this comes at a price of lower accuracy since workload-driven approaches can make use of more information. However, this is not the case. The results of our empirical evaluation demonstrate that our data-driven approach not only provides better accuracy than state-ofthe- art learned components but also generalizes better to unseen queries.