[Slides] [Paper]

An end-to-end research vehicle for the field of self-driving DBMSs.

These steps were tested on a fresh repository clone, Ubuntu 22.04.

# Setup dependencies.
# You may want to create a Python 3.10 virtual environment (e.g. with conda) before doing this.
./dependency/install_dependencies.sh

# Compile a custom fork of PostgreSQL, load TPC-H (SF 0.01), train the Proto-X agent, and tune.
./scripts/quickstart.sh postgres tpch 0.01 protox

Autonomous DBMS research often involves more engineering than research. As new advances in state-of-the-art technology are made, it is common to find that they have reimplemented the database tuning pipeline from scratch: workload capture, database setup, training data collection, model creation, model deployment, and more. Moreover, these bespoke pipelines make it difficult to combine different techniques even when they should be independent (e.g., using a different operator latency model in a tuning algorithm).

The database gym project is our attempt at standardizing the APIs between these disparate tasks, allowing researchers to mix-and-match the different pipeline components. It draws inspiration from the Farama Foundation's Gymnasium (formerly OpenAI Gym), which accelerates the development and comparison of reinforcement learning algorithms by providing a set of agents, environments, and a standardized API for communicating between them. Through the database gym, we hope to save other people time and reimplementation effort by providing an extensible open-source platform for autonomous DBMS research.

This project is under active development. Currently, we decompose the database tuning pipeline into the following components:

1. Workload: collection, forecasting, synthesis
2. Database: database loading, instrumentation, orchestrating workload execution
3. Agent: identifying tuning actions, suggesting an action

task.py is the entrypoint for all tasks. The tasks are grouped into categories that correspond to the top-level directories of the repository:

• benchmark - tasks to generate data and queries for different benchmarks (e.g., TPC-H, JOB)
• dbms - tasks to build and start DBMSs (e.g., PostgreSQL)
• tune - tasks to train autonomous database tuning agents

The Database Gym project rose from the ashes of the NoisePage self-driving DBMS project.

The first prototype was written by Patrick Wang, integrating Boot (VLDB 2024) and Proto-X (VLDB 2024) into a cohesive system.

If you use this repository in an academic paper, please cite:

@inproceedings{lim23,
  author = {Lim, Wan Shen and Butrovich, Matthew and Zhang, William and Crotty, Andrew and Ma, Lin and Xu, Peijing and Gehrke, Johannes and Pavlo, Andrew},
  title = {Database Gyms},
  booktitle = {{CIDR} 2023, Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research},
  year = {2023},
  url = {https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2023/p27-lim.pdf},
 }

Additionally, please cite any module-specific paper that is relevant to your use.

Accelerating Training Data Generation

(citation pending)
Boot, appearing at VLDB 2024.

Simultaneously Tuning Multiple Configuration Spaces with Proto Actions

(citation pending)
Proto-X, appearing at VLDB 2024.