An Evaluation of Non-Equijoin Algorithms

A non-equijoin of relations R and S is a band join if the join predicate requires values in the join attribute of R to fall within a speci ed band about the values in the join attribute of S. We propose a new algorithm, termed a partitioned band join, for evaluating band joins. We present a comparison between the partitioned band join algorithm and the classical sort-merge join algorithm (optimized for band joins) using both an analytical model and an implementation on top of the WiSS storage system. The results show that the partitioned band join algorithm outperforms sortmerge unless memory is scarce and the operands of the join are of equal size. We also describe a parallel implementation of the partitioned band join on the Gamma database machine, and present data from speedup and scaleup experiments demonstrating that the partitioned band join is e ciently parallelizable.