In distributed database systems, relations are replicated and fragmented at multiple sites to ensure easy availability and greater reliability. This leads to an exponential increase in the possible alternatives available for selecting the set of sites, constituting a query plan, for processing....

A large number of queries are posed daily against the distributed databases spread across the globe. Query processing strategies are used to generate efficient query plans for these queries. The number of such query plans increases exponentially with the increase in the number of involved sites...