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Multi-Core, Main-Memory Joins: Sort vs. Hash Revisited

Summary: Extensive multi-core/NUMA experiments overturn claims that SIMD and NUMA favor sort-merge: optimized radix-hash join remains clearly faster, except at very large scale. Provides state-of-the-art implementations and hardware insights for parallel operators. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID
11150
Venue
VLDB
Year
2014
Pagerank
0.00023242719
Overall Rank
252 | 98.28%
DOI
10.14778/2732232.2732236

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{balkesen_vldb14,
        title = {{Multi-Core, Main-Memory Joins: Sort vs. Hash Revisited}},
        author = {Balkesen, Cagri and Alonso, Gustavo and Teubner, Jens and Özsu, M. Tamer},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '14},
        volume = {7},
        number = {1},
        pages = {85--96},
        doi = {10.14778/2732232.2732236},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2732232.2732236},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 31 of 81 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
7,242 Fast Multi-Column Sorting in Main-Memory Column-Stores 2016 SIGMOD 5.6641994e-05
7,760 NOCAP: Near-Optimal Correlation-Aware Partitioning Joins 2023 SIGMOD 5.5505651e-05
7,774 Building Advanced SQL Analytics From Low-Level Plan Operators 2021 SIGMOD 5.5468469e-05
7,820 Parallelizing Intra-Window Join on Multicores: An Experimental Study 2021 SIGMOD 5.5373345e-05
7,832 Main Memory Adaptive Denormalization 2016 SIGMOD 5.5357919e-05
8,082 Pea Hash: A Performant Extendible Adaptive Hashing Index 2023 SIGMOD 5.4915503e-05
8,234 The Case for Learned In-Memory Joins 2023 VLDB 5.460955e-05
8,374 SPRINTER: A Fast n-ary Join Query Processing Method for Complex OLAP Queries 2020 SIGMOD 5.4399097e-05
8,443 Analyzing Vectorized Hash Tables Across CPU Architectures 2023 VLDB 5.4243766e-05
8,462 Inferray: fast in-memory RDF inference 2016 VLDB 5.4211759e-05
8,636 Adaptive Code Generation for Data-Intensive Analytics 2021 VLDB 5.3954959e-05
8,880 Entropy-Learned Hashing: Constant Time Hashing with Controllable Uniformity 2022 SIGMOD 5.3524255e-05
8,904 A Design Space Exploration and Evaluation for Main-Memory Hash Joins in Storage Class Memory 2023 VLDB 5.3483178e-05
9,082 An Application-Specific Instruction Set for Accelerating Set-Oriented Database Primitives 2014 SIGMOD 5.3251649e-05
9,288 How to Stop Under-Utilization and Love Multicores 2014 SIGMOD 5.2912652e-05
9,333 Efficiently Joining Large Relations on Multi-GPU Systems 2025 VLDB 5.2887551e-05
9,439 GPH: An Efficient and Effective Perfect Hashing Scheme for GPU Architectures 2025 SIGMOD 5.2685863e-05
9,450 Engineering High-Performance Database Engines 2014 VLDB 5.2660195e-05
9,986 Thriving in the No Man’s Land between Compilers and Databases 2019 CIDR 5.1832796e-05
10,409 TQEx: Tensor-based Query Engine Enhanced by Bridging the Gap 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,479 P-MOSS: Scheduling Main-Memory Indexes Over NUMA Servers Using Next Token Prediction 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,771 Nested Parquet Is Flat, Why Not Use It? How To Scan Nested Data With On-the-Fly Key Generation and Joins 2025 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,194 Enabling Adaptive Sampling for Intra-Window Join: Simultaneously Optimizing Quantity and Quality 2024 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,204 SPID-Join: A Skew-resistant Processing-in-DIMM Join Algorithm Exploiting the Bank- and Rank-level Parallelisms of DIMMs 2024 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,348 Cache-Efficient Top-k Aggregation over High Cardinality Large Datasets 2024 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,437 Cracking-Like Join for Trusted Execution Environments 2023 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,556 Scaling Equi-Joins 2022 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,913 RAPID: In-Memory Analytical Query Processing Engine with Extreme Performance per Watt 2018 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
12,033 A Study of Sorting Algorithms on Approximate Memory 2016 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
12,044 Efficient Query Processing on Many-core Architectures: A Case Study with Intel Xeon Phi Processor 2016 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
12,170 Palette: Enabling Scalable Analytics for Big-Memory, Multicore Machines 2014 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
52 GAMMA - A High Performance Dataflow Database Machine 1986 VLDB 0.00041107291
74 Cache Conscious Algorithms for Relational Query Processing 1994 VLDB 0.00037330605
80 Hashing Methods and Relational Algebra Operations 1984 VLDB 0.00036536643
209 Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs 2009 VLDB 0.00024932174
242 A Performance Evaluation of Four Parallel Join Algorithms in a Shared-Nothing Multiprocessor Environment 1989 SIGMOD 0.00023604323
360 Design and Evaluation of Main Memory Hash Join Algorithms for Multi-core CPUs 2011 SIGMOD 0.00020182846
423 Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems 2012 VLDB 0.00018725853
652 An Overview of The System Software of A Parallel Relational Database Machine GRACE 1986 VLDB 0.00015304915
678 Fast Sort on CPUs and GPUs: A Case for Bandwidth Oblivious SIMD Sort 2010 SIGMOD 0.00015061068
712 Efficient Implementation of Sorting on Multi-Core SIMD CPU Architecture 2008 VLDB 0.0001468812
1,203 NUMA-aware algorithms: the case of data shuffling 2013 CIDR 0.00011671169
2,139 CellSort: High Performance Sorting on the Cell Processor 2007 VLDB 9.1061768e-05
3,368 CloudRAMSort: Fast and Efficient Large-Scale Distributed RAM Sort on Shared-Nothing Cluster 2012 SIGMOD 7.4713287e-05
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 8,904 A Design Space Exploration and Evaluation for Main-Memory Hash Joins in Storage Class Memory 2023 VLDB
2 152 Multiprocessor Hash-Based Join Algorithms 1985 VLDB
3 1,265 An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory 2016 SIGMOD
4 2,470 Hash-Based Join Algorithms for Multiprocessor Computers with Shared Memory 1990 VLDB
5 242 A Performance Evaluation of Four Parallel Join Algorithms in a Shared-Nothing Multiprocessor Environment 1989 SIGMOD
6 2,926 Distributed Join Algorithms on Thousands of Cores 2017 VLDB
7 3,011 Design and Evaluation of Parallel Pipelined Join Algorithms 1987 SIGMOD
8 423 Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems 2012 VLDB
9 360 Design and Evaluation of Main Memory Hash Join Algorithms for Multi-core CPUs 2011 SIGMOD
10 209 Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs 2009 VLDB