About Me

I am a PhD student in the Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University with a research interest in database management systems (DBMSs), specifically “self-driving” systems, ML for systems, and automated database tuning. I am extremely fortunate to be advised by Andy Pavlo, and I am a member of the Database Group (CMU-DB) and Parallel Data Lab.

Contact

• Email: wz2@cs.cmu.edu
• Office: GHC 9009
• GitHub
• LinkedIn
• Google Scholar

Teaching

Carnegie Mellon University

• Teaching Assistant for 15-445: Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2025)
• Teaching Assistant for 15-445: Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2024)
• Teaching Assistant for 15-721: Advanced Database Systems (Spring 2024)
• Teaching Assistant for 15-411: Compiler Design (Fall 2020)
• Teaching Assistant for 15-410: Operating System Design and Implementation (Fall 2019, Spring 2020)

Publications

• Matthew Butrovich, Samuel Arch, Wan Shen Lim, William Zhang, Jignesh M Patel, and Andrew Pavlo. “BPF-DB: A Kernel-Embedded Transactional Database Management System For eBPF Applications”. SIGMOD 2025. PDF
• Patrick Wang, Wan Shen Lim, William Zhang, Samuel Arch, and Andrew Pavlo. “Automated Database Tuning vs. Human-Based Tuning in a Simulated Stressful Work Environment: A Demonstration of the Database Gym”. SIGMOD 2025 Demo. PDF
• William Zhang, Yiwen Zhu, Yunlei Lu, Mathieu Demarne, Wenjing Wang, Kai Deng, Nutan Sahoo, Katherine Lin, Miso Cilimdzic, and Subru Krishnan. “FLAIR: Feedback Learning for Adaptive Information Retrieval”. CIKM 2025. PDF
• William Zhang, Wan Shen Lim, Matthew Butrovich, and Andrew Pavlo. “The Holon Approach for Simultaneously Tuning Multiple Components in a Self-Driving Database Management System with Machine Learning via Synthesized Proto-Actions”. VLDB 2024. PDF
• Wan Shen Lim, Lin Ma, William Zhang, Matthew Butrovich, Samuel I Arch, and Andrew Pavlo. “Hit the Gym: Accelerating Query Execution to Efficiently Bootstrap Behavior Models for Self-Driving Database Management Systems”. VLDB 2024. PDF
• Matthew Butrovich, Karthik Ramanathan, John Rollinson, Wan Shen Lim, William Zhang, Justine Sherry, and Andrew Pavlo. “Tigger: A Database Proxy That Bounces With User- Bypass”. VLDB 2023. PDF
• Wan Shen Lim, Matthew Butrovich, William Zhang, Andrew Crotty, Lin Ma, Peijing Xu, Johannes Gehrke, and Andrew Pavlo. “Database Gyms”. CIDR 2023. PDF
• Matthew Butrovich, Wan Shen Lim, Lin Ma, John Rollinson, William Zhang, Yu Xia, Andrew Pavlo. “Tastes Great! Less Filling! High Performance and Accurate Training Data Collection for Self-Driving Database Management Systems”. SIGMOD 2022. PDF
• Andrew Pavlo, Matthew Butrovich, Lin Ma, Prashanth Menon, Wan Shen Lim, Dana Van Aken, and William Zhang. “Make Your Database System Dream of Electric Sheep: Towards Self-Driving Operation”. VLDB 2021. PDF
• Lin Ma, William Zhang, Jie Jiao, Wuwen Wang, Matthew Butrovich, Wan Shen Lim, Prashanth Menon, and Andrew Pavlo. “MB2: Decomposed Behavior Modeling for Self-Driving Database Management Systems”. SIGMOD 2021. PDF
• Ling Zhang, Matthew Butrovich, Tianyu Li, Yash Nannapanei , Andrew Pavlo, John Rollinson, Huanchen Zhang, Ambarish Balakumar, Daniel Biales, Ziqi Dong, Emmanuel Eppinger, Jordi Gonzalez, Wan Shen Lim, Jianqiao Liu, Lin Ma, Prashanth Menon, Soumil Mukherjee, Tanuj Nayak, Amadou Ngom, Jeff Niu, Deepayan Patra, Poojita Raj, Stephanie Wang, Wuwen Wang, Yao Yu, and William Zhang. “Everything is a Transaction: Unifying Logical Concurrency Control and Physical Data Structure Maintenance in Database Management Systems”. CIDR 2021. PDF

Service

ACM SIGMOD

• Reviewer, Availability and Reproducibility Initiative (2025)
• Reviewer, Availability and Reproducibility Initiative (2024)

Awards and Fellowships

• 2025 MongoDB PhD Fellowship

Work History

• May 2024 to August 2024. Research Intern at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab.
• January 2021 to January 2022. Software Engineer at SingleStore on Query Processing.
• May 2019 to August 2019. Software Intern at NVIDIA Corporation.

Miscellaneous

I am fortunate to have an amazing partner who is super inspiring and an accomplished researcher.