Cortex AISQL: A Production SQL Engine for Unstructured Data

arXiv — cs.LGWednesday, November 12, 2025 at 5:00:00 AM
The launch of Cortex AISQL by Snowflake marks a significant advancement in data querying technology, particularly for handling unstructured data. By integrating native semantic operations directly into SQL, users can now execute complex queries that combine traditional relational operations with semantic reasoning. This capability is crucial as the volume of unstructured data continues to grow, necessitating more sophisticated querying methods. However, the implementation of semantic operations at a production scale presents inherent challenges, such as higher costs and latency compared to standard SQL operations. Snowflake's AISQL engine tackles these issues through innovative techniques, including AI-aware query optimization that prioritizes AI inference costs during query planning, resulting in impressive speedups of 2-8 times. Additionally, adaptive model cascades and semantic join query rewriting further enhance efficiency while maintaining 90-95% of oracle model quality. This dev…
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