Chapter 2

Query Processing and Optimization

By Temesgen T.(MSc)

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe

Chapter Outline
 Introduction
 Translating SQL Queries to Relational Algebra
 Algorithms for external Sorting
 Algorithms for Select and Join
 Algorithms for Project and Join
 Algorithms for Aggregate functions
 Pipelining
 Heuristic query optimization
 Semantic Query optimization
Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 2
Query processing and optimization
 A query expressed in a high-level query language
such as SQL must first be scanned, parsed, and
validated.
 The scanner identifies the query tokens—such
as SQL keywords, attribute names, and relation
names—that appear in the text of the query,
 The parser checks the query syntax to determine
whether it is formulated according to the syntax .

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 3

Cont’d…
 The query must also be validated by checking
that all attribute and relation names are valid and
semantically meaningful names in the schema.
 An internal representation of the query is then
created, usually as a tree data structure called a
query tree or query graph.
 The DBMS must then devise an execution
strategy or query plan for retrieving the results
of the query from the database files.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 4

Cont’d…
 A query typically has many possible execution
strategies, and the process of choosing a suitable
one for processing a query is known as
query optimization.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 5

Steps of processing Query

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 6

Cont’d…
 The query optimizer module has the task of
producing a good execution plan.
 The code generator generates the code to execute
that plan.
 The runtime database processor has the task of
running (executing) the query code, whether in
compiled or interpreted mode, to produce the query
result.
 If a runtime error results, an error message is
generated by the runtime database processor.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 7

Cont’d…
 Finding the optimal strategy is usually too
time-consuming—except for the simplest of queries.
 Hence, planning of a good execution strategy
may be a more accurate description than query
optimization.
 A relational DBMS must systematically evaluate
alternative query execution strategies and choose a
reasonably efficient or near-optimal strategy.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 8

Cont’d…
 Each DBMS typically has a number of general
database access algorithms that implement
relational algebra operations such as
SELECT or JOIN.
 Only execution strategies that can be implemented
by the DBMS access algorithms
 That apply to the particular query, as well as to the
particular physical database design, can
be considered by the query optimization module.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 9

Cont’d…
 There are two main techniques that are employed
during query optimization.
 The first technique is based on heuristic rules
for ordering the operations in a query execution
strategy.
 A heuristic is a rule that works well in most cases
but is not guaranteed to work well in every case.
 The rules typically reorder the operations in a
query tree.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 10

Cont’d…
 The second technique involves systematically
estimating the cost of different execution
strategies and choosing the execution plan with
the lowest cost estimate.
 These techniques are usually combined in a
query optimizer.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 11

Translating SQL into Relational
Algera
 An SQL query is first translated into an equivalent
extended relational algebra expression—
represented as a query tree data structure—that
is then optimized.
 Typically, SQL queries are decomposed into
query blocks, which form the basic units that can
be translated into the algebraic operators and
optimized.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 12

Cont’d…
 A query block contains a single SELECT-FROM-
WHERE expression, as well as GROUP BY and
HAVING clauses if these are part of the block.
 Nested queries are identified as separate blocks.
 For example, the following SQL is nested

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 13

Cont’d…

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 14

Equivalent Relational Algebra

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 15

Algorithm for external sorting
 Sorting is one of the primary algorithms used in query
processing.
 External sorting refers to sorting algorithms that are
suitable for large files of records stored on disk that do
not fit entirely in main memory, such as most
database files.
 The typical external sorting algorithm uses a sort-
merge strategy, which starts by sorting small sub files.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 16

Cont’d…
 The sort-merge algorithm, like other database
algorithms, requires buffer space in main memory,
where the actual sorting and merging of the runs is
performed.
 In the sorting phase, runs (portions or pieces) of
the file that can fit in the available buffer space are
read into main memory, sorted using an internal
sorting algorithm, and written back to disk as
temporary sorted subfiles (or runs).

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Cont’d…
 In the merging phase, the sorted runs are merged
during one or more merge passes.
 Each merge pass can have one or more merge steps.
 The degree of merging (dM) is the number of sorted
sub files that can be merged in each merge step.
 The performance of the sort-merge algorithm can be
measured in the number of disk block reads and writes
before the sorting of the whole file is completed.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 18

Cont’d…

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 19

The Algorithm for SELECT and JOIN
 Implementing the SELECT Operation
 There are many algorithms for executing a SELECT
operation, which is basically a search operation to locate
the records in a disk file that satisfy a certain condition.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 20

Search Methods for Simple Selection
 A number of search algorithms are possible for
selecting records from a file.
 These are also known as file scans, because
they scan the records of a file that satisfy a
selection condition.
 If the search algorithm involves the use of an
index, the index search is called an index scan.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 21

Search Algorithms for SELECT
Operation
 S1—Linear search (brute force algorithm)
 Retrieve every record in the file, and test whether
its attribute values satisfy the selection condition.
 Each disk block is read into a main memory
buffer, and then a search through the records
within the disk block is conducted in main
memory.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 22

Cont’d…
 S2—Binary search.
 If the selection condition involves an equality
comparison on a key attribute on which the file is
ordered, binary search—which is more efficient than
linear search.
 S3a—Using a primary index. If the selection
condition involves an equality comparison on a key
attribute with a primary index—for example, Ssn =
‘123456789’.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 23

Cont’d…
 S3b—Using a hash key. If the selection condition
involves an equality comparison on a key attribute
with a hash key—for example, Ssn = ‘123456789’ in
OP1.
 S4—Using a primary index to retrieve multiple
records.
 If the comparison condition is >, >=, <, or <= on a key
field with a primary index—for example, Dnumber > 5
in OP2—use the index to find the record satisfying the
corresponding condition.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 24

Cont’d…
 S5—Using a clustering index to retrieve
multiple records. If the selection
condition involves an equality comparison on a
nonkey attribute with a clustering index.
 S6—Using a secondary (B+-tree) index on an
equality comparison.
 This search method can be used to retrieve a
single record if the indexing field is a key (has
unique values)

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 25

Cont’d…
 It is used to retrieve multiple records if the
indexing field is not a key.
 This can also be used for comparisons involving
>, >=, <, or <=.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 26

Search Methods for Complex
Selection
 If a condition of a SELECT operation is a conjunctive
condition—that is, if it is made up of several simple
conditions connected with the AND logical connective the
DBMS can use
the following additional methods to implement the operation:
 S7—Conjunctive selection using an individual index. If
an attribute involved in any single simple condition in the
conjunctive select condition has an access path that permits
the use of one of the methods S2 to S6

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 27

Cont’d…
 S8—Conjunctive selection using a composite
index.
 If two or more attributes are involved in equality
conditions in the conjunctive select condition and
a composite index (or hash structure) exists on
the combined fields.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 28

Cont’d…
 S9—Conjunctive selection by intersection of
record pointers.
 If secondary indexes (or other access paths) are
available on more than one of fields involved in
simple conditions in the conjunctive select
condition, and if the indexes include record
pointers (rather than block pointers), then each
index can be used to retrieve the set of record
pointers that satisfy the individual condition.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 29

Cont’d…
 Whenever a single condition specifies the selection
—such as OP1, OP2, or OP3— the DBMS can
only check whether or not an access path exists on
the attribute involved in that condition.
 If an access path (index or hash key or sorted file)
exists, the method corresponding to that access
path is used; otherwise, the brute
force, linear search approach of method S1 can be
used.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 30

Cont’d…
 Query optimization for a SELECT operation is
needed mostly for conjunctive select conditions
whenever more than one of the attributes involved
in the conditions have an access path.
 The optimizer should choose the access path that
retrieves the fewest records in the most
efficient way by estimating the different costs

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 31

Selectivity of a Condition
 When the optimizer is choosing between multiple
simple conditions in a conjunctive select condition, it
typically considers the selectivity of each condition.
 The selectivity (sl) is defined as the ratio of the
number of records (tuples) that satisfy the condition
between 0 and 1.
 Zero selectivity means none of the records in the file
satisfies the selection condition

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 32

Disjunctive Selection Conditions
 Compared to a conjunctive selection condition, a
disjunctive condition (where simple conditions are
connected by the OR logical connective rather
than by AND) is much harder to process and
optimize.
 For example, consider OP4:
 OP4: σDno=5 OR Salary > 30000 OR Sex=‘F’
(EMPLOYEE)

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 33

Implementing the JOIN Operation
 The JOIN operation is one of the most time-
consuming operations in query processing.
 Many of the join operations encountered in
queries are of the EQUIJOIN and NATURAL
JOIN varieties.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 34

Methods for Implementing Joins.
 J1—Nested-loop join (or nested-block join).
This is the default (brute force) algorithm, as it
does not require any special access paths on
either file in the join.
 For each record t in R (outer loop), retrieve every
record s from S (inner loop) and test whether the
two records satisfy the join condition.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 35

Cont’d…
 J2—Single-loop join (using an access
structure to retrieve the matching
records).
 If an index (or hash key) exists for one of the two
join attributes— say, attribute B of file S—retrieve
each record t in R (loop over file R)

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 36

Cont’d…
 J3—Sort-merge join. If the records of R and S are
physically sorted (ordered) by value of the join
attributes A and B, respectively, we can implement the
join in the most efficient way possible.
 J4—Partition-hash join. The records of files R and S
are partitioned into smaller files.
 The partitioning using the same hashing function h on
the join attribute A of R (for partitioning file R) and B of
S (for partitioning file S)

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Cont’d…
 First, a single pass through the file with fewer
records (say, R) hashes its records to the various
partitions of R; this is called the partitioning
phase, since the records of R are partitioned into
the hash buckets.
 The collection of records with the same value of
h(A) are placed in the same partition, which is a
hash bucket in a hash table in main memory.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 38

Cont’d…
 In the second phase, called the probing phase,
a single pass through the other file (S) then
hashes each of its records using the same hash
function h(B) to probe the appropriate bucket,
and that record is combined with all matching
records from R in that bucket.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 39

Algorithms for PROJECT and SET
Operations
 A PROJECT operation π<attribute list>(R) is straightforward to
implement if <attribute
list> includes a key of relation R.
 If <attribute list> does not include a key of R, duplicate tuples
must be eliminated by Sorting.
 Hashing can also be used to eliminate
duplicates:
 as record is hashed and inserted into a bucket of the hash file
in memory, it is checked against those records already in the
bucket;

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 40

Cont’d…
 if it is a duplicate, it is not inserted in the bucket.
 Set operations—UNION, INTERSECTION, SET
DIFFERENCE, and CARTESIAN PRODUCT—are
sometimes expensive to implement.
 In particular, the CARTESIAN PRODUCT operation R ×
S is quite expensive because its result includes a record
for each combination of records from R and S.
 The other three set operations—UNION,
INTERSECTION, and SET DIFFERENCE14—apply only
to type-compatible

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 41

Cont’d…
 The customary way to implement these
operations is to use variations of the sort-merge
technique:
 The two relations are sorted on the same
attributes, and, after sorting, a single scan
through each relation is sufficient to produce the
result.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 42

Cont’d…
 Hashing can also be used to implement UNION,
INTERSECTION, and SET DIFFERENCE.
 One table is first scanned and then partitioned
into an in-memory hash table with buckets, and
the records in the other table are then scanned
one at a time and used to probe the appropriate
partition.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 43

Implementing Aggregate Operations
 The aggregate operators (MIN, MAX, COUNT,
AVERAGE, SUM), when applied to an entire
table, can be computed by a table scan or by
using an appropriate index, if available.
 Eg. SELECT MAX (Salary) FROM EMPLOYEE
 The usual technique for such queries is to first
use either sorting or hashing on the grouping
attributes to partition the file into the appropriate
groups.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 44

Cont’d…
 Then the algorithm computes the aggregate
function for the tuples in each group, which have
the same grouping attribute(s) value.
 Notice that if a clustering index exists on the
grouping attribute(s), then the records are already
partitioned (grouped) into the appropriate
subsets.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 45

Combining Operations using
Pipelining
 It is common to create the query execution code
dynamically to implement multiple operations.
 The generated code for producing the query
combines several algorithms that correspond to
individual operations.
 The relational algebra optimization can group
operations together for execution. This is
called pipelining or stream-based processing.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 46

Using Heuristics in Query
Optimization
 It is internal representation of a query—which is
usually in the form of a query tree or a query graph
data structure.
 The scanner and parser of an SQL query first
generate a data structure that corresponds to an initial
query representation, which is then optimized
according to heuristic rules.
 This leads to an optimized query representation, which
corresponds to the query execution strategy

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 47

Cont’d…
 A query tree is used to represent a relational
algebra or extended relational algebra expression,
whereas a query graph is used to represent a
relational calculus expression.
 A query tree is a tree data structure that
corresponds to a relational algebra expression.
 It represents the input relations of the query as leaf
nodes of the tree, and represents the relational
algebra operations as internal nodes.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 48

Cont’d…
 An execution of the query tree consists of executing an
internal node operation whenever its operands are
available and then replacing that internal node by the
relation that results from
executing the operation.
 The order of execution of operations starts at the leaf
nodes, which represents the input database relations
for the query, and ends at the root
node, which represents the final operation of the query

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 49

Cont’d…
 The execution terminates when the root node
operation is executed and produces the result
relation for the query.
 For example

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 50

Cont’d…

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Cont’d…
 The optimizer must include rules for equivalence
among relational algebra expressions that can be
applied to transform the initial tree into the final,
optimized query tree.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 52

Steps in heuristic optimization
 Deconstruct the conjunctive selections into a
sequence of single selection operations.
 Move the selection operations down the query
tree for the earliest possible execution.
 First execute those selections and join operations
which will produce smallest relations.
 Replace the cartesian product operation followed
by selection operation with join operation.
 Deconstructive and move the tree down as far as
possible.
Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 53
Semantic Query Optimization
 It uses constraints specified on the database
schema—such as unique attributes and other
more complex constraints—in order to modify one
query into another query that is more efficient to
execute.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 54

Cont’d…
 If the semantic query optimizer checks for the
existence of this constraint, it does not need to
execute the query at all because it knows that the
result of the query will be empty.
 This may save considerable time if the constraint
checking can be done efficiently.

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 55

The End of Chapter Two

Thankyou for your attention!!!

Copyright © 2007 Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe Slide 13- 56