A system, method, and computer-readable medium for optimizing execution of a join operation in a parallel processing system are provided. A plurality of processing nodes that have at least one row of one or more tables involved in a join operation are identified. For each of the processing nodes, respective counts of rows that would be redistributed to each of the processing nodes based on join attributes of the rows are determined. A redistribution matrix is calculated from the counts of rows of each of the processing nodes. An optimized redistribution matrix is generated from the redistribution matrix, wherein the optimized redistribution matrix provides a minimization of rows to be redistributed among the nodes to execute the join operation.