A New Algorithm for Page Access Sequencing in Join Processing

Abstract

One of the fundamental problems in relational database management is the handling of the join operation. Two of the problems are: 1) finding a page access sequence which requires the minimum number of buffer pages if there are no page reaccesses, and 2) finding a page access sequence which requires the minimum number of page reaccesses given a fixed buffer size. In general, a heuristic for the first problem can be converted to a corresponding heuristic to the second problem.

In this paper, a new heuristic is proposed. The experimental results show that the new heuristic performs significantly better than existing heuristics for data which is modelled with geometric graphs, and no worse in others, for the first problem. It performs similarly better for the second problem if the fixed buffer size is not much less than the maximum buffer size generated in the first problem.