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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
h8b5d1916826b4eb5
Venue
VLDB
Year
2014
Pagerank
0.00023080446
Overall Rank
250 | 98.33%
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 50 of 82 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
215 Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age 2014 SIGMOD 0.00024554257
627 Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases 2015 SIGMOD 0.00015430074
710 Cache locality is not enough: High-Performance Nearest Neighbor Search with Product Quantization Fast Scan 2016 VLDB 0.00014598403
885 Rack-Scale In-Memory Join Processing using RDMA 2015 SIGMOD 0.00013222753
928 The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign 2016 VLDB 0.00013012601
965 Memory-Efficient Hash Joins 2015 VLDB 0.00012778081
1,119 A Comprehensive Study of Main-Memory Partitioning and its Application to Large-Scale Comparison- and Radix-Sort 2014 SIGMOD 0.00011927356
1,169 DimmWitted: A Study of Main-Memory Statistical Analytics 2014 VLDB 0.00011690039
1,228 A Study of the Fundamental Performance Characteristics of GPUs and CPUs for Database Analytics 2020 SIGMOD 0.00011425748
1,269 An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory 2016 SIGMOD 0.00011236561
1,720 ByteSlice: Pushing the Envelop of Main Memory Data Processing with a New Storage Layout 2015 SIGMOD 9.7828414e-05
2,002 Track Join: Distributed Joins with Minimal Network Traffic 2014 SIGMOD 9.189062e-05
2,248 Cache-Efficient Aggregation: Hashing Is Sorting 2015 SIGMOD 8.7484225e-05
2,437 Parallel Data Analysis Directly on Scientific File Formats 2014 SIGMOD 8.4576748e-05
2,485 A Memory Bandwidth-Efficient Hybrid Radix Sort on GPUs 2017 SIGMOD 8.3800709e-05
2,806 Distributed Join Algorithms on Thousands of Cores 2017 VLDB 7.9657254e-05
2,827 To Partition, or Not to Partition, That is the Join Question in a Real System 2021 SIGMOD 7.9486247e-05
2,886 Efficient Join Algorithms For Large Database Tables in a Multi-GPU Environment 2021 VLDB 7.8911081e-05
3,200 Extracting Top-K Insights from Multi-dimensional Data 2017 SIGMOD 7.5250098e-05
3,364 RUMA has it: Rewired User-space Memory Access is Possible! 2016 VLDB 7.3560582e-05
3,470 Improving Main Memory Hash Joins on Intel Xeon Phi Processors: An Experimental Approach 2015 VLDB 7.2606844e-05
3,510 Fast Queries Over Heterogeneous Data Through Engine Customization 2016 VLDB 7.2263115e-05
3,622 Triton Join: Efficiently Scaling to a Large Join State on GPUs with Fast Interconnects 2022 SIGMOD 7.1350619e-05
3,663 Maximizing Persistent Memory Bandwidth Utilization for OLAP Workloads 2021 SIGMOD 7.1008953e-05
3,715 The Case for a Learned Sorting Algorithm 2020 SIGMOD 7.0549546e-05
3,775 Hardware-conscious Query Processing in GPU-accelerated Analytical Engines 2019 CIDR 7.0079979e-05
3,969 Tensors: An abstraction for general data processing 2021 VLDB 6.8769925e-05
4,036 Scaling Up Concurrent Main-Memory Column-Store Scans: Towards Adaptive NUMA-aware Data and Task Placement 2015 VLDB 6.8259759e-05
4,063 The Art of Balance: A RateupDB Experience of Building a CPU/GPU Hybrid Database Product 2021 VLDB 6.812902e-05
4,084 PARADIS: An Efficient Parallel Algorithm for In-place Radix Sort 2015 VLDB 6.7991616e-05
4,243 SIMD- and Cache-Friendly Algorithm for Sorting an Array of Structures 2015 VLDB 6.6974353e-05
4,707 Adaptive NUMA-aware data placement and task scheduling for analytical workloads in main-memory column-stores 2017 VLDB 6.4422808e-05
4,751 MQJoin: Efficient Shared Execution of Main-Memory Joins 2016 VLDB 6.42279e-05
4,958 FPGA-based Data Partitioning 2017 SIGMOD 6.3254925e-05
5,149 Holistic Indexing in Main-memory Column-stores 2015 SIGMOD 6.2382463e-05
5,169 The 3D Hash Join: Building On Non-Unique Join Attributes 2022 CIDR 6.2335575e-05
5,202 On the Surprising Difficulty of Simple Things: the Case of Radix Partitioning 2015 VLDB 6.2175649e-05
5,373 Distributed GPU Joins on Fast RDMA-capable Networks 2023 SIGMOD 6.1405913e-05
5,522 Density-optimized Intersection-free Mapping and Matrix Multiplication for Join-Project Operations 2022 VLDB 6.0818991e-05
5,564 Charting the Design Space of Query Execution using VOILA 2021 VLDB 6.0660209e-05
5,637 FPGA-based Multithreading for In-Memory Hash Joins 2015 CIDR 6.0383864e-05
6,206 Patience is a Virtue: Revisiting Merge and Sort on Modern Processors 2014 SIGMOD 5.8334403e-05
6,228 Data Partitioning for In-Memory Systems: Myths, Challenges, and Opportunities 2019 CIDR 5.8261473e-05
6,302 Elastic Pipelining in an In-Memory Database Cluster 2016 SIGMOD 5.8013694e-05
6,414 Evaluating Multi-GPU Sorting with Modern Interconnects 2022 SIGMOD 5.7763032e-05
6,425 MorphStore: Analytical Query Engine with a Holistic Compression-Enabled Processing Model 2020 VLDB 5.7716425e-05
6,674 A Morsel-Driven Query Execution Engine for Heterogeneous Multi-Cores 2019 VLDB 5.6969479e-05
6,679 UPLIFT: Parallelization Strategies for Feature Transformations in Machine Learning Workloads 2022 VLDB 5.6956362e-05
6,757 What Is the Price for Joining Securely? Benchmarking Equi-Joins in Trusted Execution Environments 2022 VLDB 5.6724628e-05
7,122 Design and Analysis of a Processing-in-DIMM Join Algorithm: A Case Study with UPMEM DIMMs 2023 SIGMOD 5.580601e-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
55 GAMMA - A High Performance Dataflow Database Machine 1986 VLDB 0.00040385073
77 Cache Conscious Algorithms for Relational Query Processing 1994 VLDB 0.00036821827
83 Hashing Methods and Relational Algebra Operations 1984 VLDB 0.00035942723
212 Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs 2009 VLDB 0.00024786576
249 A Performance Evaluation of Four Parallel Join Algorithms in a Shared-Nothing Multiprocessor Environment 1989 SIGMOD 0.00023099455
360 Design and Evaluation of Main Memory Hash Join Algorithms for Multi-core CPUs 2011 SIGMOD 0.00019959166
423 Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems 2012 VLDB 0.00018450254
659 An Overview of The System Software of A Parallel Relational Database Machine GRACE 1986 VLDB 0.00015027863
662 Fast Sort on CPUs and GPUs: A Case for Bandwidth Oblivious SIMD Sort 2010 SIGMOD 0.00014972958
722 Efficient Implementation of Sorting on Multi-Core SIMD CPU Architecture 2008 VLDB 0.00014470465
1,205 NUMA-aware algorithms: the case of data shuffling 2013 CIDR 0.00011512846
2,173 CellSort: High Performance Sorting on the Cell Processor 2007 VLDB 8.9089575e-05
3,403 CloudRAMSort: Fast and Efficient Large-Scale Distributed RAM Sort on Shared-Nothing Cluster 2012 SIGMOD 7.3213995e-05
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 9,093 A Design Space Exploration and Evaluation for Main-Memory Hash Joins in Storage Class Memory 2023 VLDB
2 156 Multiprocessor Hash-Based Join Algorithms 1985 VLDB
3 1,269 An Experimental Comparison of Thirteen Relational Equi-Joins in Main Memory 2016 SIGMOD
4 2,515 Hash-Based Join Algorithms for Multiprocessor Computers with Shared Memory 1990 VLDB
5 249 A Performance Evaluation of Four Parallel Join Algorithms in a Shared-Nothing Multiprocessor Environment 1989 SIGMOD
6 2,806 Distributed Join Algorithms on Thousands of Cores 2017 VLDB
7 3,072 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
10 212 Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs 2009 VLDB