Cherry Picking: A Semantic Query Processing Strategy for the Evaluation of Expensive Predicates Fabio Porto, Eduardo Sany Laber, and Patrick Valduriez   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Query Processing Abstract A common requirement of many scientific applications is the ability to process queries involving expensive predicates corresponding to user programs. Optimizing such queries is hard because static cost predictions and statistical estimates are not applicable. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called Cherry Picking (CP), based on the modeling of data dependencies among expensive predicate input values as a k-partite graph. We show how CP can be easily integrated into a cost-based query processor. We propose a CP Greedy algorithm that processes the graph by selecting the candidate values that minimize query execution cost. Based on performance simulation, we show that our algorithm yields executions up to 86% faster than statically chosen pipeline strategies. ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery