Large Language Model-Enhanced Relational Operators: Taxonomy, Benchmark, and Analysis

With the development of large language models (LLMs), numerous studies integrate LLMs through operator-like components to enhance relational data processing tasks, e.g., filters with semantic predicates, knowledge-augmented table imputation, reasoning-driven entity matching and more challenging semantic query processing. These components invoke LLMs while preserving a relational input/output interface, which we refer to as LLM-Enhanced Relational Operators (LROs). From an operator perspective, unfortunately, these existing LROs suffer from fragmented definition, various implementation strategies and inadequate evaluation benchmarks. To this end, in this paper, we first establish a unified LRO taxonomy to align existing LROs, and categorize them into: Select, Match, Impute, Cluster and Order, along with their operands and implementation variants. Second, we design LROBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 290 single-LRO queries and 60 multi-LRO queries, spanning 27 databases across more than 10 domains. LROBench covers all operating logics and operand granularities in its single-LRO workload, and provides challenging multi-LRO queries stratified by query complexity. Based on these, we evaluate individual LROs under various implementations, deriving practical insights into LRO design choices and summarizing our empirical best practices. We further compare the end-to-end performance of existing multi-LRO systems against an LRO suite instantiated with these best practices, in order to investigate how to design an effective LRO set for multi-LRO systems targeting complex semantic queries. Last, to facilitate future work, we outline promising future directions and open-source all benchmark data and evaluation code, available at https://github.com/LROBench/LROBench/.