Ken: An Execution Engine for Unstructured Database Systems

Unstructured database management systems (UDBMSes) leverage machine learning to apply the relational model to modalities beyond tables, such as documents, images and videos. Queries in a UDBMS consist of logical operators for which the UDBMS chooses physical implementations (e.g., di erent models) with the goal to optimize both query latency and accuracy. However, many operators only expose a coarse-grained set of implementations, forcing the UDBMS to excessively sacri ce either accuracy or latency without middleground options. For example, an entity matching operator can either be implemented through small, specialized models or large, general-purpose models (e.g., Large Language Models) -while the former struggles on challenging inputs, the latter is more accurate but incurs orders of magnitude more computation. In this work, we aim to address this issue with model cascades, which seek to process "easy" inputs with small models and only resort to large models when necessary. However, cascades incur higher memory usage and additional data transfer between GPU memory and arithmetic units, which often slows queries compared to single models. To address this issue, we introduce Ken, a dedicated UDBMS execution engine that dynamically adapts its use of cascades to the query load, and optimizes the GPU placement and invocation scheduling of the cascade models. Compared to baselines, Ken achieves 1.7 × -3.3× latency reductions when combining similar models for a single operator, and 122× latency reductions when combining models with orders of magnitude size di erences in a multi-operator query.