Andrew Pavlo
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Computer Science
Companies, scientists and nonprofits store their data in databases and query it with SQL, the standard database language. When they want to do something SQL cannot easily express, such as data science or machine learning steps, they often write user-defined functions (UDFs), small custom programs that the database calls.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
database management systems
user-defined functions
query optimization
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Develop automatic code transformations that speed up user-defined functions (UDFs) inside SQL queries without requiring changes to application code.
- Optimize UDFs written in external languages such as Python, which rely on dynamic types and library calls, by breaking them into pieces and folding them into the calling query.
- Create new optimizations that use information about UDFs across a query's full lifecycle and across repeated runs to improve query planning and compilation.
More about the research
UDFs make code easier to write, but database management systems (DBMSs) struggle to optimize them. Often they run a UDF one row at a time, which makes answers slow and wastes computing power and energy.
Why it matters
Organizations that analyze large datasets could get answers faster and use less computing and energy, without paying to rewrite their applications. This could help businesses, scientific groups and nonprofits react more quickly to changes in their data and run more complex analyses, including AI and data science workloads, inside their databases.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Dan Suciu
University of Washington, WA·Computer Science
Compute upper bounds on query output size that are guaranteed never to be exceeded, deriving the tightest possible bound from information theory given statistics a database already stores, such as table cardinalities, distinct-value counts, and maximum degrees.
Joy Arulraj
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Computer Science·Early-career
Design query optimizers tailored to offline, exploratory video analytics that use accuracy-driven optimization to reduce the cost of running complex computer vision pipelines over large video datasets.
Zeyu Ding
Binghamton University, NY·Computer Science
Build automated tools that analyze an SQL database schema and help users interactively define a customizable privacy model specifying which data elements need differential-privacy protection, and which variant.
The school
Carnegie Mellon University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $505M a year on research, 346 research doctorates a year.
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