Demonstrating GenDB: Instance-Optimized and Customized Query Processing Code Generation via LLM Agents
Authors: Jiale Lao, Immanuel Trummer
Organizations: Cornell University
Abstract
Traditional query processing engines require continuous development and extensions to support new techniques and user requirements, and in some cases, entirely new systems must be built from scratch. However, these engines are difficult to extend due to their internal complexity, and building new systems demands significant engineering effort and cost. To address this, we demonstrate GenDB, a generative query engine that shifts query processing from manually engineered systems to query processing code generation driven by Large Language Models (LLMs). An early prototype of GenDB uses LLM agents to generate instance-optimized query execution code tailored to specific data, workloads, and hardware resources. This prototype suits offline code generation for repetitive, templated queries, since the upfront generation cost amortizes over many executions and correctness can be ensured through extensive fuzz testing and manual inspection. For ad-hoc queries, GenDB can work with a traditional DBMS in a hybrid architecture: the DBMS handles one-off queries, while GenDB speeds up frequent SQL templates. Our demonstration allows users to (1) visually and interactively explore how GenDB analyzes workloads, profiles hardware resources and underlying data, produces query plans, generates code based on them, and finally uses an optimizer to iteratively achieve a correct and efficient implementation; (2) use visual inspection and analysis to gain qualitative insights into why GenDB produces code that achieves significantly better performance than state-of-the-art query engines on two benchmarks: TPC-H and a newly constructed benchmark designed to reduce potential data leakage from LLM training data; and (3) upload their own data and queries to explore GenDB with different LLMs and query patterns.
Mainstream relational databases ship a uniform feature set across deployments, although individual workloads exercise only a fraction of the available subsystems. We investigate whether a database can instead be generated on demand with a feature set matched to the target workload. We present SpecDB, a system that uses large language models (LLMs) to synthesize customized relational databases. We survey 9 production systems and decompose them into 10 functional modules, each further divided into implementation variants. To capture cross-module dependencies, including cases where implementations in disjoint subtrees must be co-designed, we adopt the FODA feature model and extend it with a cooperate edge, yielding a dependency graph DBGraph. SpecDB operationalizes DBGraph through a layered module-construction pipeline in which each module is generated, validated, and integrated by a dedicated subagent (driven by three inner agents: Main, Tester, Architect), and a Refining Agent that iteratively repairs and tunes the assembled database against a user-supplied refining harness with read-only access to existing database source code. A companion selection component translates a natural-language workload description into a set of implementation variants, providing an end-to-end pipeline from workload description to deployable database. We evaluate SpecDB on TPC-C with BenchmarkSQL. The generated database (23,779 lines of Rust) completes 60-minute TPC-C at 1 and 10 warehouses with zero errors. At 10 warehouses it reaches tpmC=130, compared to 128 for PostgreSQL and 127 for MySQL, with comparable latency at ~3% of their code size. Because the agent operates at module-specification level rather than product source, it can in principle combine techniques across system boundaries. Paired with falling LLM costs, generating a purpose-built database for a target workload is becoming straightforward.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in database-backed applications to classify tuples, filter records using semantic predicates, extract structured attributes, and enrich query results. Yet the prompt that start these computations are typically stored outside the DBMS in unstructured formats, making them invisible to query execution, metadata management, and optimization. Drawing on Stonebraker's QUEL as a Data Type and the principles of reflective programming, this paper introduces PromptDB, a database system that treats prompts as tuple-level database values. PromptDB provides a logical PROMPT datatype whose values store a template, bindings to tuple attributes, model metadata, and task metadata. Relations may contain PROMPT attributes directly in base tables, or expose them through views over joined tuples. Users query prompt-valued attributes through generated evaluation views, while the system internally renders, rewrites, optimizes, and executes prompts through an EVAL operator. Making prompts database-visible creates a new optimization space. The key idea is to bring query-optimizer thinking to prompts: just as query optimizers exploit database metadata to rewrite SQL plans, PromptDB exploits database metadata to rewrite prompts. We evaluate PromptDB on synthetic and real-world data workloads across different tasks. The results show how database-guided rewriting improves output validity and yields favorable cost-quality trade-offs compared with static, manually written prompts.
LLM-based agents for text-to-SQL often struggle with latency-performance trade-off, where performance improvements come at the cost of latency or vice versa. We reformulate text-to-SQL generation within the lens of software test coverage where the original query is prepared with a suite of test cases with simpler, atomic SQLs that are executed in parallel and together ensure semantic coverage of the original query. After iterating on test case coverage, the final SQL is generated only when enough information is gathered, leveraging the explored test case SQLs to ground the final generation. We validated our framework on a state-of-the-art benchmark for text-to-SQL, Spider 2.0, achieving a new state-of-the-art with 70.2% execution accuracy.