Neither Cover nor Pack: Distributed Worst-Case Optimality of Degree-2 Joins

We study the worst-case communication complexity of the join query evaluation problem over large-scale data in distributed shared-nothing systems under the MPC model. We focus on multi-round MPC algorithms that run in constant number of rounds. The problem is well-understood for a few classes of queries, mainly the class of acyclic queries and the class of graph-like queries. For queries not belonging to either class, the complexity picture is much less clear. We study the class of degree-two queries and fragments thereof. In this paper, we tighten the gap between the upper and lower bounds for the studied classes and establish worst-case optimality for some fragments of the considered classes. We also debunk a well-believed conjecture about which query-related quantity, in the worst-case, optimally captures the communication complexity of the studied problem.