Wii: Dynamic Budget Reallocation In Index Tuning (Extended Version)

Index tuning aims to find the optimal index configuration for an input workload. It is often a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, largely attributed to the huge amount of “what-if” calls made to the query optimizer during configuration enumeration. Therefore, in practice it is desirable to set a budget constraint that limits the number of what-if calls allowed. This yields a new problem of budget allocation, namely, deciding on which query-configuration pairs (QCP’s) to issue what-if calls. Unfortunately, optimal budget allocation is NP-hard, and budget allocation decisions made by existing solutions can be inferior. In particular, many of the what-if calls allocated by using existing solutions are devoted to QCP’s whose what-if costs can be approximated by using cost derivation, a well-known technique that is computationally much more efficient and has been adopted by commercial index tuning software. This results in considerable waste of the budget, as these what-if calls are unnecessary. In this paper, we propose “Wii,” a lightweight mechanism that aims to avoid such spurious what-if calls. It can be seamlessly integrated with existing configuration enumeration algorithms. Experimental evaluation on top of both standard industrial benchmarks and real workloads demonstrates that Wii can eliminate significant number of spurious what-if calls. Moreover, by reallocating the saved budget to QCP’s where cost derivation is less accurate, existing algorithms can be significantly improved in terms of the final configuration found.