LOGER: A Learned Optimizer towards Generating Efficient and Robust Query Execution Plans

Query optimization based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has become a hot research topic recently. Despite the achieved promising progress, DRL optimizers still face great challenges of robustly producing efficient plans, due to the vast search space for both join order and operator selection and the highly varying execution latency taken as the feedback signal. In this paper, we propose LOGER, a learned optimizer towards generating efficient and robust plans, aiming at producing both efficient join orders and operators. LOGER first utilizes Graph Transformer to capture relationships between tables and predicates. Then, the search space is reorganized, in which LOGER learns to restrict specific operators instead of directly selecting one for each join, while utilizing DBMS built-in optimizer to select physical operators under the restrictions. Such a strategy exploits expert knowledge to improve the robustness of plan generation while offering sufficient plan search flexibility. Furthermore, LOGER introduces epsilon-beam search, which keeps multiple search paths that preserve promising plans while performing guided exploration. Finally, LOGER introduces a loss function with reward weighting to further enhance performance robustness by reducing the fluctuation caused by poor operators, and log transformation to compress the range of rewards. We conduct experiments on Join Order Benchmark (JOB), TPC-DS and Stack Overflow, and demonstrate that LOGER can achieve a performance better than existing learned query optimizers, with a 2.07x speedup on JOB compared with PostgreSQL.