Join strategies on KD-tree indexed relations

Join algorithms on KD-tree indexed relations are proposed. The join algorithms are based on a concept called wave. The wave is a set of pages that is the object of joining and that propagates over the relation space in the direction of the join attribute axis. Four basic join algorithms that determine the wave from one of the relations and one algorithm that determines the wave from both relations are proposed. The algorithms are described and extensively analyzed with analytical formulas and simulation results. Then a garbage collection mechanism is introduced that discards the unnecessary data loaded in the main memory and extends the previous basic algorithms with an efficient memory management. It is shown that the proposed algorithms perform the join of very large relations with one scan