Abstract: Minimizing both the response time to produce the first few thousand results and the overall execution time is important for interactive querying. Current join algorithms either minimize the execution time at the expense of response time or minimize response time by producing results early without optimizing the total time. Disclosed herein is a hash-based join algorithm, called early hash join, which can be dynamically configured at any point during join processing to tradeoff faster production of results for overall execution time. Varying how inputs are read has a major effect on these two factors and provide formulas that allow an optimizer to calculate the expected rate of join output and the number of I/O operations performed using different input reading strategies.