Ongoing thesis research · University of Waterloo

A* search for query planning

I’m exploring A*-based query planning in the ITB query compiler. The work considers how to construct and compare candidate plans while keeping the search space manageable.

Areas I’m investigating include:

• Selective generation of query-plan fragments
• Search-state representation and dominance pruning
• Cost estimation for partial plans

I write up papers I present or read closely, along with reports from course and research projects. Each one tries to say what the work establishes and where I think it stops short.

• TalkCS 848, University of WaterlooOctober 2026

  Column stores: from C-Store to modern analytical databases

  On C-Store (2005) and the two Abadi papers (2006, 2008). Which execution features explain the speedups, why the layout alone does not, and what Vertica, Snowflake, DuckDB and ClickHouse kept.

• ProjectCS 680, University of WaterlooFall 2026

  Adapting learned cost models to new hardware

  1,162 PostgreSQL queries timed with identical plans in six environments. One measured query per template, with a per-template offset, comes close to retraining; nothing helps on templates never measured.

• TalkCS 886, University of WaterlooFall 2026

  Scaling laws for neural language models

  On Kaplan et al. (2020). The fitted power laws, the batch-size correction that the compute result depends on, and why the paper’s most quoted conclusion rests on its least robust number.

All notes and talks

University of Toronto Mississauga

I previously supported undergraduate courses in computer science and mathematics at UTM. My teaching experience includes the following courses.

For academic and research correspondence, you can reach me at my Waterloo email.