A Cardinality Estimator in Complex Database Systems Based on TreeLSTM

Cardinality estimation is critical for database management systems (DBMSs) to execute query optimization tasks, which can guide the query optimizer in choosing the best execution plan. However, traditional cardinality estimation methods cannot provide accurate estimates because they cannot accurately capture the correlation between multiple tables. Several recent studies have revealed that learning-based cardinality estimation methods can address the shortcomings of traditional methods and provide more accurate estimates. However, the learning-based cardinality estimation methods still have large errors when an SQL query involves multiple tables or is very complex. To address this problem, we propose a sampling-based tree long short-term memory (TreeLSTM) neural network to model queries. The proposed model addresses the weakness of traditional methods when no sampled tuples match the predicates and considers the join relationship between multiple tables and the conjunction and disjunction operations between predicates. We construct subexpressions as trees using operator types between predicates and improve the performance and accuracy of cardinality estimation by capturing the join-crossing correlations between tables and the order dependencies between predicates. In addition, we construct a new loss function to overcome the drawback that Q-error cannot distinguish between large and small cardinalities. Extensive experimental results from real-world datasets show that our proposed model improves the estimation quality and outperforms traditional cardinality estimation methods and the other compared deep learning methods in three evaluation metrics: Q-error, MAE, and SMAPE.