Papers › Skew Strikes Back: New Developments in the Theory of Join Algorithms
Skew Strikes Back: New Developments in the Theory of Join Algorithms
Hung Q. Ngo, Christopher Re, Atri Rudra
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Evaluating the relational join is one of the central algorithmic and most well-studied problems in database systems. A staggering number of variants have been considered including Block-Nested loop join, Hash-Join, Grace, Sort-merge for discussions of more modern issues). Commercial database engines use finely tuned join heuristics that take into account a wide variety of factors including the selectivity of various predicates, memory, IO, etc. In spite of this study of join queries, the textbook description of join processing is suboptimal. This survey describes recent results on join algorithms that have provable worst-case optimality runtime guarantees. We survey recent work and provide a simpler and unified description of these algorithms that we hope is useful for theory-minded readers, algorithm designers, and systems implementors.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections