Yes. The closest analogy is a distributed hash join, though it is more general than just equi-joins. In a distributed hash join, there is a hashing stage that reorganizes the data to improve locality and selectivity before the actual join stage. For topological representations, there is information theoretic locality inherent in the sharding organization but the underlying &quot;shape&quot; of two tables may look very different such that there is no direct mapping of records between the two. Fortunately, there is a trivially constructible and very fast transform function on shard definition (which is just a constraint) that allows it to directly map to constraints (shards) in different data models without moving any data. In effect, it is as though the table is already been hash distributed for whatever join you want to run.<p>The capability of these generalized parallel ad hoc join algorithms where demonstrated on a supercomputer circa 2009.