It is argued that the next generation of systems for semantic query optimization must move from optimized execution of fixed semantic plans toward cost-aware execution of agentic analytics workflows.
Enterprises increasingly seek to query data lakes using natural language via AI-driven tools like semantic operators or deep research agents. However, the latter operates as an opaque black box, hiding its intermediate reasoning and data retrieval steps, and failing to expose controls for managing API costs and execution latency. Meanwhile, the former can be prohibitively expensive for enterprise-scale data lakes. Consequently, analysts using these systems lack the agency to intercept hallucinated premises, verify intermediate results, or correct the system's trajectory. We present Carnot, an interactive execution engine for AI-driven analytics. Carnot compiles natural language requests into physical execution graphs and surfaces them through an interactive notebook interface. Rather than waiting blindly for a final output, users can critique the plan, incrementally execute operators, inspect intermediate data, or directly edit the underlying code or semantic operator instructions. Carnot's query optimizer will optimize the query with respect to cost or latency constraints provided by the user. Our demo will showcase how Carnot helps users achieve efficient and verifiable insights on workloads motivated by real enterprise use cases.
Matthew Russo, Yash Agarwal, Tianyu Li et al.· 0 citations
CADAQUES is an open-source Python framework built on one architectural principle: cost is a first-class primitive of the discovery loop, which separates the loop into two structural protocols, an Oracle that answers queries and a Driver that proposes them, and charges both evaluations and decisions against a common vector-valued budget.
Query planners are typically expected to produce optimized plans quickly, leading many researchers (including the authors of this paper) and practitioners to design systems that assume query planning is a low-cost operation. Using a lightweight agentic search, we show that this assumption does not always hold. Across seven DBMSes, including four commercial systems, we find at least one query per system that takes more than three minutes to plan. In addition to being slow to plan, such queries risk tying up database resources without performing useful work, creating a potential denial-of-service vector. We analyze the queries our search uncovers and compare how the seven systems respond to each pattern. We find that although the queries triggering slow planning are largely DBMS-specific, recurring pathologies involving correlated subqueries, CTE expansion, repeated subquery expressions, disjunctive joins, and constant folding affect multiple systems. We release our uncovered queries along with a curated suite of parameterized query pathologies that researchers and database engineers can use to test planner robustness. Overall, our results show that query planning cannot always be treated as a predictably inexpensive operation and that its latency and robustness deserve further attention from both database researchers and engineers.
Geoffrey X. Yu, Ryan Marcus, Tim Kraska· 0 citations
This work proposes ProRetrieval, which recasts the language model as a retrieval orchestrator: given a natural-language query, it synthesizes an executable program in a hybrid DSL interleaving SQL operators over structured fields with vector-retrieval primitives over text and images, with SQL itself providing the logical algebra that fuses heterogeneous candidate sets.
Chengcheng You, Zhen Sun, Yunhai Hu et al.· 0 citations
LLM-QOpt++ is presented, a novel hybrid, confidence-aware query optimization framework that unifies traditional CBO estimation, machine learning–based cost prediction, and large language model (LLM) reasoning within a single adaptive pipeline.