  Two emerging hardware trends will dominate the database system technology in
the near future: increasing main memory capacities of several TB per server and
massively parallel multi-core processing. Many algorithmic and control
techniques in current database technology were devised for disk-based systems
where I/O dominated the performance. In this work we take a new look at the
well-known sort-merge join which, so far, has not been in the focus of research
in scalable massively parallel multi-core data processing as it was deemed
inferior to hash joins. We devise a suite of new massively parallel sort-merge
(MPSM) join algorithms that are based on partial partition-based sorting.
Contrary to classical sort-merge joins, our MPSM algorithms do not rely on a
hard to parallelize final merge step to create one complete sort order. Rather
they work on the independently created runs in parallel. This way our MPSM
algorithms are NUMA-affine as all the sorting is carried out on local memory
partitions. An extensive experimental evaluation on a modern 32-core machine
with one TB of main memory proves the competitive performance of MPSM on large
main memory databases with billions of objects. It scales (almost) linearly in
the number of employed cores and clearly outperforms competing hash join
proposals - in particular it outperforms the "cutting-edge" Vectorwise parallel
query engine by a factor of four.
