Efficient Massively Parallel Join Optimization for Large Queries

Modern data analytical workloads often need to run queries over a large number of tables. An optimal query plan for such queries is crucial for being able to run these queries within acceptable time bounds. However, with queries involving many tables, finding the optimal join order becomes a bottleneck in query optimization. Due to the exponential nature of join order optimization, optimizers resort to heuristic solutions after a threshold number of tables. Our objective is two fold: (a) reduce the optimization time for generating optimal plans; and (b) improve the quality of the heuristic solution.

In this paper, we propose a new massively parallel algorithm, MPDP, that can efficiently prune the large search space (via a novel plan enumeration technique) while leveraging the massive parallelism offered by modern hardware (Eg: GPUs). When evaluated on real-world benchmark queries with PostgreSQL, MPDP is at least an order of magnitude faster compared to state-of-the-art techniques for large analytical queries. As a result, we are able to increase the heuristic-fall-back limit from 12 relations to 25 relations with same time budget in PostgreSQL. Also, in order to handle queries with even larger number of tables, we augment MPDP to a well known heuristic, IDP 2 (iterative DP version 2) and a novel heuristic UnionDP. By systematically exploring a much larger search space, these heuristics provides query plans that are up to 7 times cheaper as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques while being faster to compute.