Encapsulation of parallelism and architecture-independence in extensible database query execution

Emerging database application domains demand not only high functionality, but also high performance. To satisfy these two requirements, the Volcano query execution engine combines the efficient use of parallelism on a wide variety of computer architectures with an extensible set of query processing operators that can be nested into arbitrarily complex query evaluation plans. Volcano´s novel exchange operator permits designing, developing, debugging, and tuning data manipulation operators in single-process environments but executing them in various forms of parallelism. The exchange operator shields the data manipulation operators from all parallelism issues. The design and implementation of the generalized exchange operator are examined. The authors justify their decision to support hierarchical architectures and argue that the exchange operator offers a significant advantage for development and maintenance of database query processing software. They discuss the integration of bit vector filtering into the exchange operator paradigm with only minor modifications