Access Paths for Efficient Ordering with Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.00303v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we present the \texttt{LLM ORDER BY} semantic operator as a logical abstraction and conduct a systematic study of its physical implementations. First, we propose several improvements to existing semantic sorting algorithms and introduce a semantic-aware external merge sort algorithm. Our extensive evaluation reveals that no single implementation offers universal optimality on all datasets. From our evaluations, we observe a