Improving Join Reorderability with Compensation Operators

A critical task in query optimization is the join reordering problem which is to find an efficient evaluation order for the join operators in a query plan. While the join reordering problem is well studied for queries with only inner-joins, the problem becomes considerably harder when outerjoins/antijoins are involved as such operators are generally not associative. The existing solutions for this problem do not enumerate the complete space of join orderings due to various restrictions on the query rewriting rules considered. In this paper, we present a novel approach for this problem for the class of queries involving inner-joins, single-sided outerjoins, and/or antijoins. Our work is able to support complete join reorderability for this class of queries which supersedes the state-of-the-art approaches.