In my recent blog post I remarked that database benchmarking is in a crisis because AI agents start to overfit on individual benchmarks with questionable techniques, which drives execution times towards zero. This has happened with TPC-D in the past, and broke the benchmark. TPC-H tries to fight that with rules, but most people who publish (unofficial) TPC-H results simply ignore the rules. In combination with overly eager AI agents, this leads to brutal overfitting.
We are seeing the next level of that with the GenDB-V system. The corresponding paper commands “Stop Handcrafting Your Engine! GenDB-V: Towards AI-Generated and Formally Verified Database Systems”, and reports speedups of 22× to 61× over Umbra and DuckDB, and all that in a fully verified system. These are indeed impressive claims, and would suggest that traditional database engines are in trouble.
