Query Planning & Optimization I

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Overview

SQL is declarative, so the DBMS needs to generate the “best” plan for a given query.

Optimization is an NP-hard problem, so there’s no computationally cheap way to solve the optimization problem.

Thus, Heuristics and Cost-based search are some guiding principles to optimize queries.

Rule-based Query Optimization

The DBMS can rewrite an expression with a cheaper one if they generate the same set of tuples. Some examples:

• Predicate Push-down: Perform predicate filtering before join to reduce the size of a join
• Projections Push-down: Perform projections earlier to create smaller tuples and reduce intermediate results.
• Expression Simplification: Exploit transitive properties to rewrite predicate expressions into a simpler form.

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