Speculative Ad-hoc Querying
Authors: name: Haoyu Li; name: Srikanth Kandula; name: Maria Angels de Luis Balaguer; name: Aditya Akella; name: Venkat Arun
Published: 2025-03-02 03:44:31

Abstract: Analyzing large datasets requires responsive query execution, but executing
SQL queries on massive datasets can be slow. This paper explores whether query
execution can begin even before the user has finished typing, allowing results
to appear almost instantly. We propose SpeQL, a system that leverages Large
Language Models (LLMs) to predict likely queries based on the database schema,
the user's past queries, and their incomplete query. Since exact query
prediction is infeasible, SpeQL speculates on partial queries in two ways: 1)
it predicts the query structure to compile and plan queries in advance, and 2)
it precomputes smaller temporary tables that are much smaller than the original
database, but are still predicted to contain all information necessary to
answer the user's final query. Additionally, SpeQL continuously displays
results for speculated queries and subqueries in real time, aiding exploratory
analysis. A utility/user study showed that SpeQL improved task completion time,
and participants reported that its speculative display of results helped them
discover patterns in the data more quickly. In the study, SpeQL improves user's
query latency by up to 289times and kept the overhead reasonable, at 4$
per hour.