A statistical approach towards robust progress estimation

  • Authors:
  • Arnd Christian König;Bolin Ding;Surajit Chaudhuri;Vivek Narasayya

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The need for accurate SQL progress estimation in the context of decision support administration has led to a number of techniques proposed for this task. Unfortunately, no single one of these progress estimators behaves robustly across the variety of SQL queries encountered in practice, meaning that each technique performs poorly for a significant fraction of queries. This paper proposes a novel estimator selection framework that uses a statistical model to characterize the sets of conditions under which certain estimators outperform others, leading to a significant increase in estimation robustness. The generality of this framework also enables us to add a number of novel "special purpose" estimators which increase accuracy further. Most importantly, the resulting model generalizes well to queries very different from the ones used to train it. We validate our findings using a large number of industrial real-life and benchmark workloads.