A practical join processing strategy that allows effective utilization of arbitrary degrees of parallelism in both the I/O subsystem and join processing subsystems is presented. Analytic bounds on the minimum execution time, minimum number of processors, and processor utilization are presented along with bounds on the execution time, given a fixed number of processors. These bounds assume that sufficient buffers are available. An analytic lower bound on buffer requirements as well as a practical heuristic for use in limited buffer environments are also presented. A sampling of corroborative simulation results are included. >