Abstract: The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for analysing a pair of data sets with respect to a predicate, the predicate having a predicate criterion, each data set comprising one or more elements sorted according to the predicate criterion. The invention comprises recursive partitioning of the data sets in a parallel manner across multiple computing cores until a base case is reached. The invention is particularly suited for carrying out join, filter and sort operations on large data sets within database management systems.