Cardinality Estimation of an SQL Query Using Recursive Neural Networks

Abstract

To learn complex interactions between predicates and accurately estimate the cardinality of an SQL query, we develop a novel framework based on recursive tree-structured neural networks, which take into account the natural properties of logical expressions: compositionality and n-ary associativity. The proposed architecture is an extension of MSCN (multi-set convolutional network) for queries containing both conjunction and disjunction operators. The goal is to represent an arbitrary logical expression in a continuous vector space by combining sub-expression vectors according to the operator type. We compared the proposed approach with the histogram-based approach on the real-world dataset and showed that our approach significantly outperforms histograms with a large margin.