About PackDB

A research collaboration between the HUDA Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi and UMass Amherst, bringing optimization directly into SQL.

Research Foundation

PackDB builds on the Package Queries framework:

Scalable Package Queries in Relational Database Systems

Matteo Brucato, Azza Abouzied, Alexandra Meliou

VLDB 2016

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Scalable Computation of High-Order Optimization Queries

Matteo Brucato, Azza Abouzied, Alexandra Meliou

Communications of the ACM, 2019

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Scaling Package Queries to a Billion Tuples

Anh L. Mai, Pengyu Wang, Azza Abouzied, Matteo Brucato, Peter J. Haas, Alexandra Meliou

VLDB 2024

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The Team

NYU Abu Dhabi

Prof. Azza Abouzied

Principal Investigator, Director HUDA Lab

Anh Mai

PhD Student, Sketch-Refine algorithm

Filip Milisov

Research Assistant

Hatim Rehmanjee

Capstone Project 2025-2026

UMass Amherst

Prof. Alexandra Meliou

Co-PI, Package Queries

Matteo Brucato

Researcher, Package Queries

Peter J. Haas

Researcher, Scalable Package Queries

Pengyu Wang

Researcher, Scalable Package Queries

HUDA Lab

Human Data Interaction Lab

The HUDA Lab focuses on making data systems more accessible, interactive, and intelligent.

Research Areas:

  • • Query interfaces for non-experts
  • • Visual data exploration
  • • Automated data analysis
  • • Optimization in databases
Visit HUDA Lab Website

Technical Details

Built With

  • DuckDB — Embeddable analytical database engine
  • HiGHS — High-performance LP/MIP solver (bundled)
  • SymbolicC++ — Computer algebra for constraint linearization

Current Status

Version: 0.1.0 (Prototype)
Branch: hatim (stable)
Test Coverage: automated test suite
Target Scale: ~10K rows (exact solving)

Future Development

  • Sketch-Refine Algorithm

    Scale to million-row datasets with bounded approximation error

  • Correlated Subqueries

    Support data-dependent constraint bounds via query unnesting

  • Automatic Linearization

    Automatically reformulate common non-linear patterns into linear equivalents

  • Performance Benchmarking

    Comprehensive benchmarks and solver-level optimizations