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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2117Cite as

Pipelining

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Definition

The query execution engine operates on an execution plan produced during query processing which typically is a physical operator graph whose edges specify the dataflow among the operators. There are two basic alternatives for evaluating the execution plan: materialization and pipelining. With materialized evaluation, the results of each operator are created (materialized) and stored in disk and then used as input for the evaluation of the next operator. With pipelining, the results of an operator are passed along as input to the next operator, before the first operator completes its execution. In general, pipelining improves the efficiency of query evaluation by reducing the number of temporary files that are produced.

Key Points

The output of query optimization is an execution plan or operator tree. The execution plan can be thought of as a dataflow graph where the nodes correspond to the physical operators and the edges represent the data flow among these physical...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Graefe G. Query evaluation techniques for large databases. ACM Comput. Surv., 25(2): 73–170, 1993.

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  2. Silberschatz A., Korth H.F., and Sudarshan S. Database System Concepts, 5th edn. McGraw Hill, New York, 2005.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

    Evaggelia Pitoura

Authors
  1. Evaggelia Pitoura
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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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Pitoura, E. (2009). Pipelining. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_872

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