The Value of Merge-Join and Hash-Join in SQL Server

Summary: Evaluates the incremental value of merge-join and hash-join in SQL Server for OLTP and DSS workloads using an internal build and TPC-D experiments. Shows that OLTP workloads need only nested loops, while delivering optimal decision-support performance requires both merge-join and hash-join. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 8570
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1999
Pagerank: 8.6089125e-05
Overall Rank: 2,518 | 82.49%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Goetz Graefe

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
258	DB2 Design Advisor: Integrated Automatic Physical Database Design	2004	VLDB	0.0003022091
527	Rethinking Database System Architecture: Towards a Self-tuning RISC-style Database System	2000	VLDB	0.00020868847
1,659	Fractal Prefetching B+-Trees: Optimizing Both Cache and Disk Performance	2002	SIGMOD	0.00010980701

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0040449103
9	Implementation Techniques For Main Memory Database Systems	1984	SIGMOD	0.0014279444
1,710	Microsoft Index Tuning Wizard for SQL Server 7.0	1998	SIGMOD	0.00010807871
1,900	Hash joins and hash teams in Microsoft SQL Server	1998	VLDB	0.000101645

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232	A Performance Evaluation of Four Parallel Join Algorithms in a Shared-Nothing Multiprocessor Environment	1989	SIGMOD	0.00032122485
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2,640	Design and Evaluation of Parallel Pipelined Join Algorithms	1987	SIGMOD	8.3924401e-05
1,900	Hash joins and hash teams in Microsoft SQL Server	1998	VLDB	0.000101645