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Parallel Query Optimization

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Optimization of parallel query plans

Definition

Parallel query optimization is the process of finding a plan for database queries that employs parallel hardware effectively. The details of this process depend on the types of parallelism supported by the underlying hardware, but the most common method is partitioning of the data across multiple processors.

Historical Background

Most parallel database systems today can trace part of their heritage back to the Gamma project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the 1980s – with the exception of the Teradata system, which predates Gamma by several years. Also influential were the GRACE database machine, developed at the University of Tokyo, and work at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, University of Trondheim. These projects did not publish a description of their parallel query optimization algorithms, however. Later projects, like XPRS (University of California, Berkeley) and IBM DB2 Parallel Edition describe that...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Hans Zeller & Goetz Graefe

Authors
  1. Hans Zeller
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  2. Goetz Graefe
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Zeller, H., Graefe, G. (2009). Parallel Query Optimization. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1079

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