Structural decomposition methods offer powerful theoretical guarantees for join evaluation, yet they are rarely used in real-world query optimizers. A major reason is the difficulty of combining cost-based plan search and structure-based evaluation. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing meta-decompositions for acyclic queries, a novel representation that succinctly represents all possible join trees and enables their efficient enumeration. Meta-decompositions can be constructed in polynomial time and have sizes linear in the query size. We design an efficient polynomial-time cost-based optimizer based directly on the meta-decomposition, without the need to explicitly enumerate all possible join trees. We characterize plans found by this approach using a novel notion of width, which effectively implies the theoretical worst-case asymptotic bounds of intermediate result sizes and running time of any query plan. Experimental results demonstrate that, in practice, the plans in our class are consistently comparable to -- even in many cases better than -- the optimal ones found by the state-of-the-art dynamic programming approach, especially on large and complex queries, while our planning process runs by orders of magnitude faster, comparable to the time taken by common heuristic methods.

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