Approximate query processing (AQP) can accelerate long-running analytical queries by orders of magnitude. But why is AQP still rare in production? To address it, we develop PilotDB, an online AQP middle that makes 0 changes to DBMSs, delivers results with a priori error guarantees, and achieves up to 126x speedup. 1/8

We are presenting PilotDB at SIGMOD 2025! Paper: Code: Blog: See the rest of the thread for a high-level picture. 2/8

PilotDB is independent of the underlying DBMS. We evaluate PilotDB on three DBMSs with synthetic and realistic benchmarks. Running with a target error of 5%, PilotDB achieves 1. Up to 126x (a geometric mean of 24x) speedup on PostgreSQL 16. 2. Up to 117x (GM 18x) speedup on SQL Server 2022. 3. Up to 13x (GM 7x) speedup on DuckDB 1.2. 6/8