Including the load balancing issue in the optimization of multi-way join queries for shared-nothing database computers

A consensus on parallel architecture for very large database management has emerged. This architecture is based on a shared-nothing hardware organization. This computation model, however, is very sensitive to the skewness in the tuple distribution. Recently, several parallel join algorithms with dynamic load balancing capabilities have been proposed to address this issue. However, none of these algorithms consider the multi-way join problems. In this paper, we propose a dynamic load balancing technique for multi-way joins, and investigate the effect of load balancing on query optimization.