Page access scheduling in join processing

Abstract

The join relational operation is one of the most expensive among database operations. In this study, we consider the problem of scheduling page accesses in join processing. This raises two interesting problems: (1) determining a page access sequence that uses the minimum number of buffer pages without any page reaccesses, and (2) determining a page access sequence that minimizes the number of page reaccesses for a given buffer size. We use a graph model to represent the pages from the relations that contain tuples to be joined, and present new heuristics for the two problems. Our experimental results show that the new heuristic performs well.