The theme does come up in some papers - Google's F1 papers for example. A lot of it doing the engineering work to make known techniques work - you can have a b

The theme does come up in some papers - Google's F1 papers for example. A lot of it doing the engineering work to make known techniques work - you can have a broadcast join that spills to disk (using a hybrid hash join or similar) and then layer on other techniques to make the spilling more incremental and reduce the penalties from spilling (e.g. bloom filters). It's just an order-of-magnitude increase in complexity to go from a simple broadcast join to a robust one.