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: 5.2933372e-05
Overall Rank: 8,658 | 41.79%
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
6,149	Similarity Join over Array Data	2016	SIGMOD	5.8706665e-05
10,061	Finding Logic Bugs in Spatial Database Engines via Affine Equivalent Inputs	2024	SIGMOD	5.0875952e-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	0.001992968
146	Efficient Processing of Spatial Joins Using R-trees	1993	SIGMOD	0.00029061754
168	Efficient Exact Set-Similarity Joins	2006	VLDB	0.00027163517
752	Partition Based Spatial-Merge Join	1996	SIGMOD	0.00014246504
985	The TPR*-Tree: An Optimized Spatio-Temporal Access Method for Predictive Queries	2003	VLDB	0.00012685169
1,996	Epsilon Grid Order: An Algorithm for the Similarity Join on Massive High-Dimensional Data	2001	SIGMOD	9.216723e-05
2,016	Optimizing Multidimensional Index Trees for Main Memory Access	2001	SIGMOD	9.1771614e-05
2,176	Efficient Processing of k Nearest Neighbor Joins using MapReduce	2012	VLDB	8.9159001e-05
2,309	STRIPES: An Efficient Index for Predicted Trajectories	2004	SIGMOD	8.6626683e-05
2,577	ClusterJoin: A Similarity Joins Framework using Map-Reduce	2014	VLDB	8.2738285e-05
3,120	Size Separation Spatial Join	1997	SIGMOD	7.6300049e-05
4,134	ST2B-tree: A Self-Tunable Spatio-Temporal B+-tree Index for Moving Objects	2008	SIGMOD	6.787575e-05
4,837	An Experimental Analysis of Iterated Spatial Joins in Main Memory	2013	VLDB	6.3872905e-05
4,956	TOUCH: In-Memory Spatial Join by Hierarchical Data-Oriented Partitioning	2013	SIGMOD	6.340462e-05
5,863	A Benchmark for Evaluating Moving Object Indexes	2008	VLDB	5.9667924e-05
6,797	Spatial Joins in Main Memory: Implementation Matters!	2015	VLDB	5.6798855e-05
7,215	Indexing Methods for Moving Object Databases: Games and Other Applications	2013	SIGMOD	5.5837763e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,120	Size Separation Spatial Join	1997	SIGMOD
2	2,886	Efficient Join Algorithms For Large Database Tables in a Multi-GPU Environment	2021	VLDB
3	7,560	Cache-oblivious High-performance Similarity Join	2019	SIGMOD
4	6,097	Trajectory Similarity Join in Spatial Networks	2017	VLDB
5	4,956	TOUCH: In-Memory Spatial Join by Hierarchical Data-Oriented Partitioning	2013	SIGMOD
6	994	Spatial Hash-Joins	1996	SIGMOD
7	9,905	DiskJoin: Large-scale Vector Similarity Join with SSD	2026	SIGMOD
8	1,922	Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join	1998	VLDB
9	6,149	Similarity Join over Array Data	2016	SIGMOD
10	4,837	An Experimental Analysis of Iterated Spatial Joins in Main Memory	2013	VLDB