THERMAL-JOIN: A Scalable Spatial Join for Dynamic Workloads

Summary: THERMAL-JOIN is a scalable spatial self-join for dynamic, memory-resident scientific simulations. A nested spatial grid identifies hot spots of nearby objects, yielding 8–12x speedups over state-of-the-art and scalable with higher precision. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hd07097eedf8d8e2b
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 5.2908314e-05
Overall Rank: 8,666 | 41.76%
DOI: 10.1145/2723372.2749434

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Farhan Tauheed (Oracle)
2. Thomas Heinis (Imperial College London)
3. Anastasia Ailamaki (EPFL)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tauheed_sigmod15,
        title = {{THERMAL-JOIN: A Scalable Spatial Join for Dynamic Workloads}},
        author = {Tauheed, Farhan and Heinis, Thomas and Ailamaki, Anastasia},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '15},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2723372.2749434},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723372.2749434},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,151	Similarity Join over Array Data	2016	SIGMOD	5.8678874e-05
10,066	Finding Logic Bugs in Spatial Database Engines via Affine Equivalent Inputs	2024	SIGMOD	5.0851868e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2	R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure For Spatial Searching	1984	SIGMOD	0.0019923528
146	Efficient Processing of Spatial Joins Using R-trees	1993	SIGMOD	0.00029048509
168	Efficient Exact Set-Similarity Joins	2006	VLDB	0.00027151132
752	Partition Based Spatial-Merge Join	1996	SIGMOD	0.00014239937
985	The TPR*-Tree: An Optimized Spatio-Temporal Access Method for Predictive Queries	2003	VLDB	0.00012679233
1,998	Epsilon Grid Order: An Algorithm for the Similarity Join on Massive High-Dimensional Data	2001	SIGMOD	9.2123795e-05
2,019	Optimizing Multidimensional Index Trees for Main Memory Access	2001	SIGMOD	9.1749414e-05
2,175	Efficient Processing of k Nearest Neighbor Joins using MapReduce	2012	VLDB	8.918268e-05
2,312	STRIPES: An Efficient Index for Predicted Trajectories	2004	SIGMOD	8.658611e-05
2,577	ClusterJoin: A Similarity Joins Framework using Map-Reduce	2014	VLDB	8.2699584e-05
3,122	Size Separation Spatial Join	1997	SIGMOD	7.6263979e-05
4,135	ST2B-tree: A Self-Tunable Spatio-Temporal B+-tree Index for Moving Objects	2008	SIGMOD	6.7843671e-05
4,840	An Experimental Analysis of Iterated Spatial Joins in Main Memory	2013	VLDB	6.3842693e-05
4,958	TOUCH: In-Memory Spatial Join by Hierarchical Data-Oriented Partitioning	2013	SIGMOD	6.3374701e-05
5,865	A Benchmark for Evaluating Moving Object Indexes	2008	VLDB	5.9639679e-05
6,803	Spatial Joins in Main Memory: Implementation Matters!	2015	VLDB	5.6771982e-05
7,217	Indexing Methods for Moving Object Databases: Games and Other Applications	2013	SIGMOD	5.5811364e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,122	Size Separation Spatial Join	1997	SIGMOD
2	2,887	Efficient Join Algorithms For Large Database Tables in a Multi-GPU Environment	2021	VLDB
3	7,566	Cache-oblivious High-performance Similarity Join	2019	SIGMOD
4	6,099	Trajectory Similarity Join in Spatial Networks	2017	VLDB
5	4,958	TOUCH: In-Memory Spatial Join by Hierarchical Data-Oriented Partitioning	2013	SIGMOD
6	994	Spatial Hash-Joins	1996	SIGMOD
7	9,912	DiskJoin: Large-scale Vector Similarity Join with SSD	2026	SIGMOD
8	1,924	Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join	1998	VLDB
9	6,151	Similarity Join over Array Data	2016	SIGMOD
10	4,840	An Experimental Analysis of Iterated Spatial Joins in Main Memory	2013	VLDB