A Study of Query Execution Strategies for Client-Server Database Systems

Query processing in a client-server database system raises the question of where to execute queries to minimize the communication costs and response time of a query, and to load-balance the system. This paper evaluates the two common query execution strategies, data shipping and query shipping, and a policy referred to as hybrid shipping. Data shipping determines that queries be executed at clients; query shipping determines that queries be executed at servers; and hybrid shipping provides the flexibility to execute queries at clients and servers. The experiments with a client-server model confirm that the query execution policy is critical for the performance of a system. Neither data nor query shipping are optimal in all situations, and the performance penalities can be substantial. Hybrid shipping at least matches the best performance of data and query shipping and shows better performance than both in many cases. The performance of hybrid shipping plans, however, is shown to be sensitive to changes in the state of the system (e.g., the load of machines and the contents of caches). Initial experiments indicate that an extended version of a 2-step optimization may be an effective strategy for adjusting plans according to the state of the system at runtime. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-85