A Performance Evaluation of Pointer-Based Joins

Summary: Pointer-based variants of nested-loops, sort-merge, and hybrid-hash joins are analyzed against standard counterparts. Pointer-based joins offer gains in many settings, but the nested-loops variant underperforms for medium-to-large joins in OO DBs. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hc4d5cb7ece5380dc
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1990
Pagerank: 9.03108e-05
Overall Rank: 2,107 | 85.84%
DOI: 10.1145/93597.98739

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Eugene J Shekita (University of Wisconsin)
2. Michael J Carey (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{shekita_sigmod90,
        title = {{A Performance Evaluation of Pointer-Based Joins}},
        author = {Shekita, Eugene J and Carey, Michael J},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '90},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/93597.98739},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/93597.98739},
        year = {1990}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,171	Set Containment Joins: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly	2000	VLDB	0.00011702886
1,376	Experiences Building the Open OODB Query Optimizer	1993	SIGMOD	0.00010874518
1,594	Evaluation of Main Memory Join Algorithms for Joins with Subset Join Predicates	1997	VLDB	0.00010133792
2,366	Efficient Assembly of Complex Objects	1991	SIGMOD	8.5648664e-05
2,549	A Transformation-Based Approach to Optimizing Loops in Database Programming Languages	1992	SIGMOD	8.3124291e-05
4,192	Cost-based Selection of Path Expression Processing Algorithms in Object-Oriented Databases	1996	VLDB	6.7446783e-05
5,122	An Incremental Join Attachment for Starburst	1990	VLDB	6.2643185e-05
5,584	Efficient Main Memory Data Management Using the DBGraph Storage Model	1990	VLDB	6.0763134e-05
8,549	OFL: A Functional Execution Model for Object Query Languages	1995	SIGMOD	5.3171056e-05
9,312	From Nested-Loop to Join Queries in OODB	1994	VLDB	5.1962034e-05
9,552	GES: High-Performance Graph Processing Engine and Service in Huawei	2025	SIGMOD	5.1587287e-05
13,224	Evaluating Functional Joins Along Nested Reference Sets in Object-Relational and Object-Oriented Databases	1998	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
59	Differential Files: Their Application To The Maintenance Of Large Data Bases	1976	SIGMOD	0.00039605949
96	The Database Language GEM	1983	SIGMOD	0.00034286345
156	Multiprocessor Hash-Based Join Algorithms	1985	VLDB	0.00028522117
397	R* Optimizer Validation and Performance Evaluation for Local Queries	1986	SIGMOD	0.00019157058
698	A Data Model and Query Language for EXODUS	1988	SIGMOD	0.00014687325
1,253	A Model of Queries for Object-Oriented Databases	1989	VLDB	0.00011336027
1,489	Storage and Access Structures to Support a Semantic Data Model	1982	VLDB	0.00010514004
3,559	The O2 Object Manager: an Overview	1989	VLDB	7.2074755e-05
5,122	An Incremental Join Attachment for Starburst	1990	VLDB	6.2643185e-05

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