Supporting top-K join queries in relational databases

  • Authors:

  • Ihab F. Ilyas;Walid G. Aref;Ahmed K. Elmagarmid

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN;Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN;Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

  • Venue:
  • VLDB '03 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Very large data bases - Volume 29
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Ranking queries produce results that are ordered on some computed score. Typically, these queries involve joins, where users are usually interested only in the top-k join results. Current relational query processors do not handle ranking queries efficiently, especially when joins are involved. In this paper, we address supporting top-k join queries in relational query processors. We introduce a new rank-join algorithm that makes use of the individual orders of its inputs to produce join results ordered on a user-specified scoring function. The idea is to rank the join results progressively during the join operation. We introduce two physical query operators based on variants of ripple join that implement the rank-join algorithm. The operators are nonblocking and can be integrated into pipelined execution plans. We address several practical issues and optimization heuristics to integrate the new join operators in practical query processors. We implement the new operators inside a prototype database engine based on PREDATOR. The experimental evaluation of our approach compares recent algorithms for joining ranked inputs and shows superior performance.