Algorithm

Construct (python library)

Statistics

Theoretical computer science

Telecommunications

Column (typography)

Independence (probability theory)

Data mining

Computer science

Cardinality (data modeling)

Table (database)

Mathematics

Estimator

Autoregressive model

Programming language

Frame (networking)

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

Query optimizers rely on accurate cardinality estimates to produce good execution plans. Despite decades of research, existing cardinality estimators are inaccurate for complex queries, due to making lossy modeling assumptions and not capturing inter-table correlations. In this work, we show that it is possible to learn the correlations across all tables in a database without any independence assumptions. We present NeuroCard, a join cardinality estimator that builds a single neural density estimator over an entire database. Leveraging join sampling and modern deep autoregressive models, NeuroCard makes no inter-table or inter-column independence assumptions in its probabilistic modeling. NeuroCard achieves orders of magnitude higher accuracy than the best prior methods (a new state-of-the-art result of 8.5x maximum error on JOB-light), scales to dozens of tables, while being compact in space (several MBs) and efficient to construct or update (seconds to minutes).

NeuroCard