AI-driven analytics are increasingly crucial to data-centric decision-making. The practice of exporting data to machine learning runtimes incurs high overhead, limits robustness to data drift, and expands the attack surface, especially in multi-tenant, heterogeneous data systems. Integrating AI directly into database engines, while offering clear benefits, introduces challenges in managing joint query processing and model execution, optimizing end-to-end performance, coordinating execution under resource contention, and enforcing strong security and access-control guarantees. This paper discusses the challenges of joint DB-AI, or AIxDB, data management and query processing within AI-powered data systems. It presents various challenges that need to be addressed carefully, such as query optimization, execution scheduling, and distributed execution over heterogeneous hardware. Database components such as transaction management and access control need to be re-examined to support AI lifecycle management, mitigate data drift, and protect sensitive data from unauthorized AI operations. We present a design and preliminary results to demonstrate what may be key to the performance for serving AIxDB queries.
@article{arxiv.2603.03772,
title = {Towards Effective Orchestration of AI x DB Workloads},
author = {Naili Xing and Haotian Gao and Zhanhao Zhao and Shaofeng Cai and Zhaojing Luo and Yuncheng Wu and Zhongle Xie and Meihui Zhang and Beng Chin Ooi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03772},
year = {2026}
}