Automatic Index Selection in RDBMS by Exploring Query Execution Plan Space

A novel approach to solving Index Selection Problem (ISP) is presented. In contrast to other known ISP approaches, our method searches the space of possible query execution plans, instead of searching the space of index configurations. An evolutionary algorithm is used for searching. The solution is obtained indirectly as the set of indexes used by the best query execution plans. The method has important features over other known algorithms: (1) it converges to the optimal solution, unlike greedy heuristics, which for performance reasons tend to reduce the space of candidate solutions, possibly discarding optimal solutions; (2) though the search space is huge and grows exponentially with the size of the input workload, searching the space of the query plans allows to direct more computational power to the most costly plans, thus yielding very fast convergence to “good enough” solutions; and (3) the costly reoptimization of the workload is not needed for calculating the objective function, so several thousands of candidates can be checked in a second. The algorithm was tested for large synthetic and real-world SQL workloads to evaluate the performace and scalability.