Using Parallelism and Pipeline for the Optimisation of Join Queries

In this study we present a technique for the parallel optimisation of join queries, that uses the offered coarse-grain parallelism of the underlying architecture in order to reduce the CPU-bound optimisation overhead. The optimisation technique performs an almost exhaustive search of the solution space for small join queries and gradually, as the number of joins increases, it diverges towards iterative improvement. This technique has been developed on a low-parallelism transputer-based architecture, where its behaviour is studied for the optimisation of queries with many tenths of joins.