# A Novel Technique for Query Plan Representation Based on Graph Neural Nets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04814/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Masked Label Prediction: Unified Message Passing Model for Semi-Supervised Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03509/) (2020)
- [Improved Semantic Representations From Tree-Structured Long Short-Term Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00075/) (2015)
- [A System for Massively Parallel Hyperparameter Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05934/) (2018)
- [Edge Directionality Improves Learning on Heterophilic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10498/) (2023)
- [Neo: A Learned Query Optimizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03711/) (2019)
- [Bao: Learning to Steer Query Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03814/) (2020)
- [An End-to-End Learning-based Cost Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02560/) (2019)
- [Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Readouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04952/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Reqo: A Comprehensive Learning-Based Cost Model for Robust and Explainable Query Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17414/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning representations for query plans play a pivotal role in machine learning-based query optimizers of database management systems. To this end, particular model architectures are proposed in the literature to transform the tree-structured query plans into representations with formats learnable by downstream machine learning models. However, existing research rarely compares and analyzes the query plan representation capabilities of these tree models and their direct impact on the performance of the overall optimizer. To address this problem, we perform a comparative study to explore the effect of using different state-of-the-art tree models on the optimizer's cost estimation and plan selection performance in relatively complex workloads. Additionally, we explore the possibility of using graph neural networks (GNNs) in the query plan representation task. We propose a novel tree model BiGG employing Bidirectional GNN aggregated by Gated recurrent units (GRUs) and demonstrate experimentally that BiGG provides significant improvements to cost estimation tasks and relatively excellent plan selection performance compared to the state-of-the-art tree models.