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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1981–1985Cite as

Operator-Level Parallelism

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Synonyms

Inter-operator parallelism

Definition

Operator-level parallelism (or inter-operator parallelism) is a form of intra-query parallelism obtained by executing concurrently several operators of the same query. By contrast, intra-operator parallelism is obtained by executing the same operator on multiple processors, with each instance working on a different subset of data.

Historical Background

Parallelism has been a key focus of database research since the 1970s. For example, as early as 1978 Teradata was building highly-parallel database systems and quietly pioneered many of the ideas on parallel query execution [5]. However, the intra-query parallelism employed by these early systems was mostly intra-operator or independent parallelism (see Classes of Parallelism below). Gamma [4] was one of the first database systems that allowed operator-level parallelism through pipelining.

Foundations

Parallel processing uses multiple processors cooperatively to improve the performance of...

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Recommended Reading

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  4. DeWitt D.J. and Gray J. Parallel database systems: the future of high-performance database computing. Commun. ACM, 35(6):85–98, 1992.

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  5. DeWitt D.J., Gerber R.H., Graefe G., Heytens M.L., Kumar K.B., and Muralikrishna M. GAMMA – A high performance dataflow database machine. In Proc. 12th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 1986, pp. 228–237.

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  8. IBM Corp. DB2 Version 9 Performance Guide. Part No. SC10–4222–00, 2006.

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  9. Oracle Corp. Oracle Database Data Warehousing Guide. 10g Release 1 (10.1). Part No. B10736–01, 2003.

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  11. Yu P.S., Chen M.-S., Wolf J.L., and Turek J.J. Parallel query processing. In Advanced Database Systems, N. Adam, B. Bhargava, (eds.). LNCS, vol. 759, Springer, Berlin, 1993, pp. 239–258.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Nikos Hardavellas & Ippokratis Pandis

Authors
  1. Nikos Hardavellas
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  2. Ippokratis Pandis
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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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Hardavellas, N., Pandis, I. (2009). Operator-Level Parallelism. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_661

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